session-installer crashed with TypeError in _on_property_changed(): could not convert type dbus.Array to PyObject required for parameter 0

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu ISO testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/1028640

crash while trying to install rar for file-roller

crash while to play music which was located on the network.

This bug bit me while trying to install rar, however I had apt-get going in a terminal installing some other stuff at the same time, so I'm gonna take a wild guess and say that it crashed because it couldn't get the dpkg lock.

Hit me trying to install fluendo mp3 codecs on the fly from Firefox - only app running, no other updates or package management going on.

Precise Daily updated from 10.31am 08.08.12

Hardware profile: https://wiki.edubuntu.org/robinc/Laptop/DellMM061

Crashed installing mp3 plugins for Rhythmbox.

crashed installing card themes in FreeCell Solitary

Also occurs when attempting to install GIMP to open a .xcf document.

Occurred when installing package(s) for MOV file in movie player.

The playback of this movie requires a MPEG-4 AAC decoder plugin which is not installed.

When I try to open eclipse application, ubuntu inturn tried to install a plugin and crashed while running session-installer.

Occurred when installing package(s) for MOV file in movie player.

The playback of this movie requires a MPEG-4 AAC decoder plugin which is not installed.

This is the single most frequent crash report in 12.10 right now. Marking as high-priority, and marking for SRU as well since this appears to be a regression introduced in SRU.

Marking as 'high' because this is the single most frequent crash reported in 12.10 right now.

Was going to mark this for SRU as well, but it looks like there isn't actually any evidence of this crash occurring with 12.04; so it's probably an aptdaemon behavior change (as the backtrace somewhat suggests), and not a bug in sessioninstaller at all.

According to <https://errors.ubuntu.com/bucket/?id=%2Fusr%2Fbin%2Fsession-installer%3ATypeError%3Amsg_reply_handler%3Async_properties%3A_on_property_changed>, the crash first appeared on July 23; so this may be correlated with aptdaemon 0.45+bzr848-0ubuntu1 (uploaded July 24 according to the changelog):

  * New upstream snapshot:
    - aptdaemon/client.py: Prefer GI GObject module. (LP: #1026066)

Martin, do you know what needs to happen here? It looks like perhaps aptdaemon isn't compatible with the python2 version of gi.repository.GObject, which sessioninstaller is using.

Maybe this needs to be replaced with a try: import [...] except: import [...]?

Possibly (untested):

if 'gi.repository' in sys.modules:
    from gi.repository import GObject
else:
    try:
        import gobject as GObject
    except:
        from gi.repository import GObject

?

Reproducer: zcat /usr/share/doc/sessioninstaller/examples/test.gz | python - --install-packages pmount

It looks like something is importing both the static gobject as well as the GI GObject in sessioninstaller.

This is a really tricky one. sessioninstaller/core.py imports both "gst" (which pulls in the static gobject binding) as well as a lot of GI modules, so crashes will happen in all kinds of cases :-(

As Steve says, it seems to have worked better when aptdaemon used the static gobject module as well; this is no guarantee to work, but might be an appropriate workaround until we finally get gstreamer 1.0 (which is introspectable).

Fixed in lp:sessioninstaller rev 131.

This bug was fixed in the package sessioninstaller - 0.20+bzr131-0ubuntu1

---------------
sessioninstaller (0.20+bzr131-0ubuntu1) quantal; urgency=low

  * debian/control: Update Vcs-* to Quantal branch.
  * New upstream snapshot:
    - Fix typo in error message. (LP: #790500)
    - Make sure not to accidentally call defer.callback() twice (LP #848605)
    - Work around static vs. GI gobject binding crash. (LP: #1028640)
  * Drop fix-defer-callback.patch, included upstream.
 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Tue, 21 Aug 2012 08:50:56 +0200

On Aug 21, 2012, at 06:05 AM, Steve Langasek wrote:

>if 'gi.repository' in sys.modules:
> from gi.repository import GObject
>else:
> try:
> import gobject as GObject
> except:
> from gi.repository import GObject

dbus-python does something like this, with minor differences:

if 'gi' in sys.modules:
    from gi.repository import GObject as gobject
else:
    import gobject

See dbus.gobject_service.py for details.

 r16372