Subject: Re: bug#43610: IceCat segfault

From: Mark H Weaver <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Sep 2020 14:05:53 -0400

Hi,

raingloom <[email-masked]> writes:
> It crashed immediately without any visible activity.

Okay.

> It does start up properly with a fresh profile. I'll try to bisect the
> addons list later.

In the meantime, to start IceCat 78 with your existing profile but with
addons temporarily disabled, try running:

  icecat -safe-mode

That should allow you to recover your existing bookmarks, history,
cookies, saved passwords, tabs, etc.  Then you can try adding back your
preferred addons incrementally to find out which one is causing the
problem.

> Tbh this would be a good time to have a debug output for IceCat on hand.

While I acknowledge that it might occasionally be useful in edge cases
like this, it would also dramatically increase the memory requirements
at build time.  For what it's worth, in the ~6 years that I've been
maintaining the IceCat package in Guix, I don't recall being asked for a
debug output before now.

I'm particularly sensitive to the memory requirements at build time,
because I choose not to trust the build farm and therefore to build my
entire Guix system with GNOME from source code on a relatively old
Thinkpad X200 with only 4 GB of RAM.  I've been doing this for many
years, and I'd like to enable other Guix users to do so if they wish.

My impression is that IceCat debug outputs would primarily useful to
people who are actively developing IceCat, in which case it makes more
sense to build it manually to allow incremental rebuilds after modifying
the source code.

If it turns out that there's more interest in IceCat debug outputs than
I've anticipated (others: please speak up if you need this!), I'm not
necessarily opposed to adding them, but someone with a more powerful
machine would need to take over maintenance of our IceCat package,
because I would be unable to locally test the official build.

What do you think?  Do other people need IceCat 'debug' outputs?

      Thanks,
        Mark