From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040608 Firefox/0.8.0+ Description of problem: With KDE/xcfe desktop and gnome libs (but *not* gnome desktop nor many apps) I installed and ran gnucash. On accessing the help (the manual or tutorial) or reports, gnucash would hang. A quick check with strace seemed to show it blocking on accessing a pipe, and also showed problems finding a gconf file. I downloaded and installed gnome-desktop and a few dependencies, logged into a gnome session and all seemed OK. Returning to xcfe/kde shows the problem is still there, which suggests it depends on some gnome component running. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): gnucash-1.8.9-1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Start kde/xcfe desktop 2. Run gnucash 3. From the menu choose help/tutorial or help/help Actual Results: Gnucash hangs, sometimes with a small "GnuCash Help" window (empty). Expected Results: Help displayed. Additional info: Not sure if this is actually a problem with guile or the gnome help system, since I don't run a lot of gnome apps.
Following up on my own post... I think it is something to do with gconf - from memory, it wasn't running before but is now that I've rebooted my machine, and the problem has gone away. Previously, I could reproduce it on demand. I'm guessing if you accept the default install of a Gnome desktop you'd never notice this, since you'd get the relevant .gconfd directory setup and so there'd be something there for gnucash to read/save config in (if that's what it's for). Presumably, this affects many gnome-based applications.
What was it running through the pipe? Was it executing htmlview, or something else?
Created attachment 101498 [details] Installation log from gnucash until it worked
Can't say, sorry. The only process I can see is: /usr/bin/guile -e main -s /usr/libexec/gnucash/overrides/gnucash Opening help doesn't seem to start any new processes, so presumably it's already running something. Can't see any obvious candidates in my "ps". I've attached the installation log of around the time - the second group must contain something that enables part of the gnome infrastructure to run. There is nothing in my /var/log/messages files that show unusual activity. From memory, I don't remember gconf running (it's gconfd-1 I can see in my "ps") but it gets restarted as required if I kill it now. If I change the ownership of my ~/.gconf ~/.gconfd then I get an error message saying gtkhtml can't contact the configuration server. This is _not_ what happened before - it used to just hang. If I delete these two directories, they get recreated.
Assigning to gtkhtml for now; it appears to be something in the gtkhtml library code.
Fedora Core 2 is now maintained by the Fedora Legacy project for security updates only. If this problem is a security issue, please reopen and reassign to the Fedora Legacy product. If it is not a security issue and hasn't been resolved in the current FC3 updates or in the FC4 test release, reopen and change the version to match.
Closing per lack of response. Also note that FC1 and FC2 are no longer supported even by Fedora Legacy. If this still occurs on FC3 or FC4, please assign to that version and Fedora Legacy. If it still occurs on FC5 or FC6, please reopen and assign to the correct version. Note that gnucash has changed quite a bit since then; among other things, the move to gtk2.