"Online Accounts" icon and UI appears in g-c-c when gnome-online-accounts package is not installed, ignoring user's registration input.

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please try to obtain a backtrace following the instructions at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProgramCrash and upload the backtrace (as an attachment) to the bug report. This will greatly help us in tracking down your problem.

seb128, the program is not crashing, it seems to keep on running. First, no Apport crash pop-up appears and second, there are no crash/segfault events in /var/log/syslog.

Is gnome-control-center the only executable here? Or is the online accounts screen and/or the dialog for signing into the Google account a separate executable? To which packages do they belong?

could you get a stacktrace of the warning?

Found the cause of the problem:

While installing debug symbols for gnome-control-center I ran

dpkg -p gnome-control-center

and saw that it recommends gnome-online-accounts. Then I checked on all my three Oneiric boxes whether gnome-online-accounts is installed. On the machines where I succeeded to register my Google account gnome-online-accounts is installed on the machine where I did not succeed it is not installed. So I did

sudo apt-get install gnome-online-accounts

and after completing the installation I could register my Google account.

So the bug is now the following:

gnome-control-center offers a user interface to register a Google account, even if the backend to do the actual registration is not installed.

It should get fixed by one of the following three possibilities:

1. gnome-control-center should depend on gnome-online-accounts and not only recommend it.

2. gnome-control-center should not show the "Online Accounts" icon if gnome-online-accounts is not installed (perhaps one could move this module completely into the gnome-online-accounts package).

3. gnome-control-center should ask the user to install gnome-online-accounts when clicking the "Online Accounts" icon if the package is not installed yet. If the user accepts installing it, the "Online Accounts" UI will be shown so that the user can register his account(s). If he declines installing it gnome-control-center should return to its main (icon) screen.

It is really not a good usability to show a UI whose backend is not present and simply ignore the user's login input without showing any message. I appreciate a fix very much at least as a zero-day SRU.

Solution (1) is a tiny patch on debian/control, so it could be even done as direct upload into Oneiric, incontrary to solution (2) and (3) which require modifying/writing code and/or moving files between packages. So I suggest fixing via (1) only in Oneiric and via (2) or (3) in Precise.

Thanks Till, setting to Low since gnome-online-account is installed by default so most users will not run into the issue

I'm on Ubuntu 13.10 and the problem mentioned still exists.

Still exists in Ubuntu 14.04 and 14.10

i got the problem too in my 15.04, no fixing ?

It's still an issue in Ubuntu 18.04 and 18.10. g-c-c should really prompt the user to install gnome-online-accounts if it is not installed instead of pretending to work and then failing.