Bug#511633: icedtea-gcjwebplugin: crashes on every site that contains applets

[Terry Watt]

I only started seeing this recently (but on multiple architectures and 
systems).  On a clean Sid install, I get the error as in message #5; if 
I manually created ~/.icedteaplugin/icedtea-plugin-to-appletviewer as a 
link to /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/bin/pluginappletviewer, I get 
the error as in message #15.  I also get pipes appearing in 
~/.gcjwebplugin to the pluginappletviewer either way.

However, a fix is this: when I uninstall this package and install 
icedtea6-plugin instead, everything works (or at least the couple of 
sites I tried that had previously been crashing and locking up 
iceweasel, such as the link in #5 and www.emolecules.com).  Using this 
plugin, I get pipes to the appletviewer here instead of in 
.gcjwebplugin.  This suggests to me that the problem is not necessarily 
in this package, but could instead be in java-gcj.  The timing of the 
update to 1.0.80-1 I did on my existing Squeeze systems (as opposed to 
the clean install) approximately coincides with when the problem started 
occurring.  However, this is speculation on my part, since I haven't 
worked out the exact relationships amongst all the java packages.

Regardless of where exactly the problem lies, for now I'm just using the 
alternate plugin package.  I don't really know why I was using 
icedtea-gcjwebplugin instead of icedtea6-plugin in the first place, 
except that the former was available a few months sooner and I probably 
just adopted the first one to be packaged.