Top Icon Plus and pidgin can lead to gnome-shell crash.

[zelch]

Alright, this doesn't happen every time, but many days it happens several times a day.

As best as I can tell, the state for what icons are present on top gets messed up, this can lead to symptoms such as large blank spaces between icons for example, where some part of the rendering system thinks icons should be, but none are present.

The problem comes when something happens like removing or adding an icon at that point, or for some reason some notifications cause the same problem, in that event gnome-shell itself freezes, and then tries to restart.

If things go 'smoothly', after a short while you have a working system again, with gnome-shell restarted and things in a more or less clean state. If things don't go smoothly gnome-shell encounters the same problem on restart, and then your whole session dies.

This seems to be happening both on Ubuntu 16.04 and on Debian sid (as of yesterday anyhow).

[phocean]

Using Pidgin on Fedora every day with no crash at all.
So, I will need the logs from journalctl, please. You can grep on gnome-shell and attach the output here.
Thanks.

[zelch]

The next comment will have logs of a crash cycle that I believe to be due to this extension.

Reviewing things shows that it may not be the only source of my stability problems, but it definitely seems to be one of them.

(For some reason it's not letting me attach this, if this keeps failing I'll just put a link to it in the next comment.)

[phocean]

log.txt

[zelch]

Thank you. What was github unhappy about in there?

[phocean]

I moved your log to the file above.

Well, they are not really helpfull, however.
Are you aware of issue #6?

Please try with the "blinking" feature disabled.

Anyway, I cannot reproduce any crash. So here are a couple of extra questions:

• From where did you install the extension?
• What are the other extension installed?
• Have you tried with only TopIcons enabled? With no extension and the legacy tray?

[zelch]

Installed from extension.gnome.org

I have: Caffeine, Status Area Horizontal Spacing, Top Icon Plus, Touchpad Indicator.

Until I started digging in earnest I had Urgent, Notifications Alert, and Pidgin IM integration installed.

I will update this if/when I see this again, hopefully with a more helpful log.

In regards to #6, I am experiencing that intermittently, and it is causing some definite annoyance. I have seen pidgin do this back before gnome-shell was a thing, and thought they had it fixed. With Pidgin IM Integration out of the mix I will probably be spending a little time trying to identify that problem. We'll see.

[phocean]

Ok, thank you. I will also try to reproduce it on a text box with these extensions.

[zelch]

gnome-shell-journal.2.txt

[zelch]

There is another crash, happened when I exited pidgin, restarted, saw that somehow it had two places for the same icon (which was rendered as blank, but that might have been my fault), and then exited again.

[phocean]

Ok, the problem is that nothing in the logs tells about the incident source. It could be because of any extension, pdgin, gnome-shell or a mix of several.
I will give a look at a Debian box with pidgin.

[zelch]

With the Blinking feature patched in pidgin to work a little differently I have not seen this again so far.

I need to clean up the patch slightly and submit it.

[phocean]

Wow, good job... and good news. I have to test it.
Let me know how it evolves and if the solving is confirmed.

[JonathonReinhart]

Just wanted to point this out: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1390198#c23

[phocean]

@JonathonReinhart You should open a new issue, as it is not related to Pidgin.

Also, there is no way that TopIcons and TopIcons Plus can work together, so I am not suprised that something fishy happen.

So please open an issue only if TopIcons plus happen to crash alone. Also make sure that you are using the latest version from this github repo.

[phocean]

@zelch I don't know how it is going with Pidgin, but I found that Gaijim happens to work perfectly on all points. I think it has got a better maintenance and is more up-to-date.

[phocean]

By the way, as per issue #6, I think we can close this.

[nxadm]

Most of the time when loging in after booting the computer, top-icons-plus has trouble loading correctly: the icons place on the top right gets a big empty space (you could put 10 icons in there, at least) and the left bottom drawer appears. If you right-click on the empty space, you get the menu of dropbox (loaded with the session). If you close dropbox, gnome-shell dies. In the new session, top-icons-plus and dropbox work fine.

Although I don't load pidgin with the session (and is often not running when it crashes), the crashes I experience may be related to #73. I also experience, less commonly crashes after screen unlock but I haven't pinned this down. An important remark is that crashes never happen with top-icons-plus disabled. It also may be related to #88, dropbox being a QT app.

Attached you'll find the log. I don't see nothing special there. This is the order of events in the logs:

1. boot + 1st login with not working top-icon-plus + dropbox.
2. Right click empty status icons space and from the dropbox menu, choose quit.
3. Gnome-shell crashes.
4. New login + everything OK.

Thank you for your time and for providing this great functionality that Gnome is missing.

gnome-shell.log

[phocean]

This is quite old so I am closing it.

Feel free to reopen it if necessary.