Bug#748349: cheese fails to save photos (tries to write to root directory)

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

Package: cheese
Version: 3.12.1-1
Severity: important

I tried taking a webcam photo with cheese.  After taking the photo,
the video window turns black and shows the message:

 There was an error playing video from the webcam

On stderr, it shows:

(cheese:1519): cheese-WARNING **: Error while writing to file "/2014-05-16-061252.jpg".: gstmultifilesink.c(653): gst_multi_file_sink_render (): /GstCameraBin:camerabin/GstMultiFileSink:imagebin-filesink:
Permission denied

It looks like the program is trying to write to the root directory.  I
don't see a way in the GUI preferences to get it to write elsewhere.

#575605 suggests that cheese might be pulling info about where to save
 from xdg-user-dirs, which i didn't have installed originally.

I tried installing xdg-user-dirs, but that doesn't seem to have
improved matters -- cheese still appears to be trying to save to the
root directory.

I tried supplying the environment variable directly with:

XDG_PICTURES_DIR=/home/dkg/Pictures cheese

but that still leaves things in the same situation.

and i have nothing set in gconf either (i know that's supposed to be
deprecated):

0 dkg at alice:~$ gconftool-2 --get /apps/cheese/photo_path
No value set for `/apps/cheese/photo_path'
0 dkg at alice:~$ 

However, using dconf-editor, i was able to set /org/gnome/cheese/photo-path 

once i set that, i was able to save photos.

I note in dconf-editor that the description of this configuration
setting is:

   Defines the path where the photos are stored. If empty,
   "XDG_PHOTO/Webcam" will be used.

normal users won't be able to do any of these steps.  

If XDG_PHOTO (whatever that is) isn't set up properly, maybe there's a
better explicit fallback than the root directory of the filesystem,
which is pretty much guaranteed to not be writable to the user?

Or maybe cheese needs to explicitly depend on more packages to get
sane defaults?  Or both?

Thanks for maintaining cheese in debian,

     --dkg

-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (200, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.14-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages cheese depends on:
ii  cheese-common          3.12.1-1
ii  gnome-video-effects    0.4.0-1
ii  libc6                  2.18-5
ii  libcanberra-gtk3-0     0.30-2
ii  libcheese-gtk23        3.12.1-1
ii  libcheese7             3.12.1-1
ii  libclutter-1.0-0       1.18.2-1
ii  libclutter-gtk-1.0-0   1.5.2-2
ii  libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0     2.30.7-1
ii  libglib2.0-0           2.40.0-3
ii  libgnome-desktop-3-10  3.12.1-1
ii  libgstreamer1.0-0      1.2.4-1
ii  libgtk-3-0             3.12.1-1

Versions of packages cheese recommends:
ii  gnome-icon-theme    3.12.0-1
ii  gvfs                1.20.1-1+b1
ii  hicolor-icon-theme  0.13-1
pn  nautilus-sendto     <none>
pn  yelp                <none>

Versions of packages cheese suggests:
pn  gnome-video-effects-frei0r  <none>

-- debconf-show failed