empathy assertion failure: empathy:ERROR:empathy-tp-chat.c:1391:empathy_tp_chat_acknowledge_message: assertion failed: (m != NULL)

This happens when sending messages to an AIM account (specifically). I have not been able to determine if it happens on other transports.

Thanks for your bug report and helping to make ubuntu better. I have pushed this bug upstream and therefore have marked as triaged and moved the importance to medium. We look forward to your future bug reports

Confirming here.

empathy:ERROR:empathy-tp-chat.c:1391:empathy_tp_chat_acknowledge_message: assertion failed: (m != NULL)

I've experienced this crash with Google Talk

I have this problem too. I'm on the latest Karmic.

Same problem on Karmic Beta.

Same here, Karmic. Although, empathy was running in the background for me when it happend.

Up-to-date Kubuntu Karmic (beta)
I was chatting and then closed the chat window. I was expecting a reply message and when no notification appeared for some time I double-clicked the contact and Empathy crashed.

Yup, still an issue in beta.

Running karmic beta, when pasting an url in a chat message (msn) it crashed...
same assertion failure

Unless you have new information about this bug, please don't add "me too" comments -- instead, just toggle the "this bug affects me too" link at the top of this page. Thanks!

Happenend to me during an ICQ conversation. After restarting Empathy, the message is shown in my message history as being sent twice, while actually nothing happened, i.e. my friend did not recieve it.

The symptoms are slightly different from Johannes Maibaum on my machine, during an MSN conversation : My message history also shows the message as being sent twice, but it was received only once.

Same thing like Mats, MSN, message send twice.

The AIM protocol behaves in the same manner; the line sent before the crash appears twice, but is received only once.

Crash on Karmic Beta sending a message to a Google Talk contact. Message sent twice when restart empathy.

bug #443340 seems similar to this one

I think the priority of this bug should be raised. For me, it happens everyday and the worst part is that before one notices that empathy has reached the bug by crashing when typing something, no notification of incoming messages is shown.

I second the request for assigning a higher priority. Often this bug hits me several times a day. For me it is easily the only bug left in Karmic that reminds me I'm running a beta instead of a stable release.

I have this problem too. Karmic beta i386, updated to the latest.
it crashes after runing for several hours.

It also happens on sending a message to gmail

I'd be interested to know if this bug still happen in 2.28.1. It *could* be a
side effect of the last _run_ calls which have been removed in this release.

empathy crashed sending message to 'sametime' contact and message was duplicated as well

From my point of view I experienced those "hungs" when speeding through the menus of an conversation. But until now it didn't re-appear. I only tested a couple of minutes because "my problem" came up quickly. I will investigate this tomorrow more intense.

I'm still seeing the crash under 2.28.1
For me it happens when I open empathy from the envelope icon, doubleclick on a gtalk contact, and then send a message, all after not having sent a message in a while.

Running Karmic Koala beta, kept up to date. I still encounter this bug in Empathy and have also had it occur in Pidgin - same protocols (AIM and Google Talk), same symptoms, same error. So it may relate to one or more of the dependencies shared between Pidgin and Empathy (since Empathy depends libpurple, among others.) This bug occurs several times a day and will prove to be a "Linux sucks" showstopper for new users.

It's really annoying.
@Katzedecimal more likely: "Empathy sux". It's not blame of linux.
Switching back to psi :-(

Matt: thanks for this log, it's really useful. Do you remember what you did with the chat window when you reproduced this bug? Especially I'd be interested to know if you:
- move chat tabs
- detach chat tabs to another window
- etc

I'm really interested by this information so if anyone having experienced this crash can provide these info please speak. :)

I received the crash after trying to send a message to a yahoo im contact.

the chat window did not display the message i entered, and empathy froze for 5-10 seconds before the assertion triggered and crashed empathy.

Just had this problem with empathy 2.28.1-1ubuntu1 on up-to-date karmic, x64. Empathy was set to offline mode overnight, I got to work in the morning and set it to online. It logged into my Google Talk account, found status information for my contacts, but then a contact tried to message me, and I got this error, and empathy crashed and restarted. Seems to have been directly triggered by the IM from my friend, although not sure what internal state caused that to happen.

+1, here's how it just happened. I was connected since a few hours, and:

- I clicked to show all contacts (aka. "ctrl+H")
- one of my contacts was online with the busy status (I was set to "available" status myself)
- clicked that contact, started typing, and then it crashed
- restarted empathy, started a conversation with that contact again, and noticed that the previous message at the time of the crash appeared twice in the chat history above

I'm still looking for a way to reproduce this crash. I'm especially interested in the following info:
- Did you speak to the contact before?
- Did you initate the conversation or did he?
- Did you close the chat window containing a tab with this contact previoulsy? Or just close the tab but not the whole window?
- Did you move the tab inside the chat window?
- Did you detach the tab to a new window?

Thanks a lot.

I saw a new message from a friend who did not have an open chat window with me currently.
Saw his message first in a Dark Grey window. Clicked on the envelope, selected his name and his chat popped open in another tab of my chat window. Had two previous chats with others open, his was the third. Of the first two one was a chatroom and the second was another one to one chat. Upon sending the second chat to him empathy crashed. Restart indicated the chat had been sent. Display repeated the message, and glad it did not get lost during the event. :-)

I initiated the conversation. I sent one message to the contact before. I had closed the whole chat window previously. Didn't move or detach the tabs at all.

please get me off of this list

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 3:08 PM, Graeme Humphries <email address hidden> wrote:
> I initiated the conversation. I sent one message to the contact before.
> I had closed the whole chat window previously. Didn't move or detach the
> tabs at all.
>
> --
> empathy assertion failure: empathy:ERROR:empathy-tp-chat.c:1391:empathy_tp_chat_acknowledge_message: assertion failed: (m != NULL)
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/408530
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of a duplicate bug.
>
> Status in High-level library and user-interface for Telepathy: New
> Status in “empathy” package in Ubuntu: Triaged
>
> Bug description:
> Binary package hint: empathy
>
> After several hours of running, empathy will crash, from pasting (usually a) URL to a user.
>
> 1) lsb_release -rd
> Description:    Ubuntu 9.04
> Release:        9.04
>
> 2) empathy:
>  Installed: 2.26.1-1ubuntu1
>  Candidate: 2.26.1-1ubuntu1
>  Version table:
>  *** 2.26.1-1ubuntu1 0
>        500 http://ftp.ussg.iu.edu jaunty/universe Packages
>        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
>
> 3) empathy sends the message, and continues to work.
>
> 4) empathy crashes.  Below are the appropriate lines from strace.  Also of note: re-opening the chat window shows two (2) lines of the pasted content, however, the recipient receives only one.
>
> munmap(0xb53ae000, 4096)                = 0
> clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, {602498, 28670077}) = 0
> gettimeofday({1249324357, 782837}, NULL) = 0
> write(2, "**\nERROR:empathy-tp-chat.c:1361:e"..., 99**
> ERROR:empathy-tp-chat.c:1361:empathy_tp_chat_acknowledge_message: assertion failed: (m != NULL)
> ) = 99
> rt_sigprocmask(SIG_UNBLOCK, [ABRT], NULL, 8) = 0
> tgkill(31382, 31382, SIGABRT)           = 0
> --- SIGABRT (Aborted) @ 0 (0) ---
> +++ killed by SIGABRT +++
>

Yeah i can reproduce it if I have a conversation with someone, then close the chat window. Then chat with someone else. Then If I chat with the frist contact again, it crashes when sending the first message.

It seems important to have two windows open at the same time and that after another conversation you change back to the first one you previously chatted with. And that the window with the first chat was closed in between.

So to sum up

- Did you speak to the contact before?
Yes. In between the window was closed.

- Did you initate the conversation or did he?
I initiated it in this case.

- Did you close the chat window containing a tab with this contact previoulsy? Or just close the tab but not the whole window?
I did not use tabs, but have every conversation in its own window

- Did you move the tab inside the chat window?
No

- Did you detach the tab to a new window?
No

If I know initiate the chat to one of the two previous conversations, it works. As soon as I open the second conversation and type and send, it crashes. Hope these three posts help. Cheers.

mOmO: thanks, that's very useful information.

Which protocol are you using : Jabber, MSN, ICQ... ?
As I understand, your Empathy is configured with the "Open new chats in separated Windows" option enabled; is that correct?

Can you reproduce this crash 100% of the time? If you can, could write a detailed scenario leading to the crash from a fresh Empathy start? Something like:
- Start chat with A and send him a message
- Close A's window
- Start chat with B
- ...

Using only MSN. Happens sometimes after trying to send a message to a contact. Karmic Beta.

Hi Guillaume, I'm glad if I can be of some help :-)
I am almost exclusively using ICQ, hence all I described applied to ICQ. And yes I have selected "Open new chats in separated windows".
When I wrote my reports I could reproduce it 100% of the times. Right now all my contacts are offline but I will give you the detailed scenario from scratch and a fresh start in about 15-16 hours unless someone else does it.

Thought I'd throw in my 2 cents. This is how the error comes up for me:

1) Double-click a contact in the buddy list to open a new IM window or a new tab in the existing window (observed with both)
2) Type a message (doesn't have to be a URL)
3) Press Enter

Results:

1) Empathy immediately freezes up; the message does not appear in the IM window.
2) After several seconds Empathy closes
3) Upon restart of Empathy, the IM window reappears with most or all (observed both) ongoing chats preserved
4) The message that caused the crash appears twice in the IM window.

I spent lot of time tracking this issue and I'm now pretty sure it's because of Ubuntu's libindicate patch. As I said on the upstream bug [1], this crash is due to a leak of EmpathyChat object.

I never managed to reproduce the leak in my Empathy (upstream version) and so finally decided to take a look at the libindicate patch. And then saw this:

 cb_data = g_slice_new0 (NotificationData);
 cb_data->chat = g_object_ref (chat);
 cb_data->window = window;

 sender = empathy_message_get_sender (message);
 body = empathy_message_get_body (message);

 indicator = g_hash_table_lookup (priv->indicators, chat);
 if (indicator) {
  empathy_indicator_update (indicator, body);
 } else {
  indicator = empathy_indicator_manager_create_indicator (priv->indicator_manager,
   sender, body);
  g_signal_connect (indicator, "activate",
      G_CALLBACK (chat_window_indicator_activate_cb), cb_data);
  g_hash_table_insert (priv->indicators, chat, indicator);
 }

It's pretty obvious that this code will leak an EmpathyChat reference if:
a) indicator is not NULL (as cb_data is not even used)
b) for any reason the "activate" signal is not fired.

This is not the first time that Ubuntu's libindicate patch introduces crashes in Empathy or offer a shitty user experience (see bug #440865) for example. For the record, this patch has been proposed upstream and rejected because of its poor quality, see [2] for my list of comments (I didn't review the latest version so hopefully most of them have been fixed since).

I'm very disappointed because Empathy developpers asked many time to Ubuntu to either improve the quality of their patch or to drop it from the package. My biggest concern is that now lof of Ubuntu users have a bad image of Empathy because of this which is not fair regarding all the hard work done by the Empathy team...

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=593086#c15
[2] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=574744#c20

I'm not surprised.

Are any Ubuntu developers watching this bug?

This bug seems to be in Empathy and not libindicate itself. Marking the libindicate task as invalid.

> This bug seems to be in Empathy and not libindicate itself.

@Ted: I'm confused -- did you read comment #44, where an empathy developer tracked the problem to a particular chunk of "Ubuntu's libindicate patch"?

The libindicate patch is part of the Empathy source we distribute to add messaging indicator support to Empathy, using libindicate. The bug is in that patch, and not libindicate itself

For the record, I have tested Ken's patch since yesterday and did not get a single crash since then. Usually it had crashed several times a day.

I have built the patched version into my empathy ppa, those affected by this bug please test this version and see if you can reproduce the crash.

https://edge.launchpad.net/~ken-vandine/+archive/empathy

Thanks!

The leak fix patch seems to have helped, but I just noticed this bug was originally filed against 2.26.1 from a jaunty user, which didn't have indicator support. There must be other causes for this as well.

Ken VanDine great shot (alluding to Enemy Territory)! But I would not migrate completely to Empathy because it lacks log imports from Pidgin...

Ken: this bug appears as soon as you leak an EmpathyChat. We used to have such leaks in upstream but they have been fixed since a while.

ugh, installed .debs from Ken's PPA, but go the assertion error subsequently (after restarting empathy, too)

Please test 2.28.1.1-1~ppa1 from the same ppa, it has further fixes.

Thanks

@ken VanDine: Work fine for my =) Thanks

@ken VanDine: Work fine for my version 2.28.1.1-1~ppa1=) Thanks

Accepted empathy into karmic-proposed, the package will build now and be available in a few hours. Please test and give feedback here. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Thank you in advance!

This bug was fixed in the package empathy - 2.28.1.1-0ubuntu1

---------------
empathy (2.28.1.1-0ubuntu1) karmic-proposed; urgency=low

  * New upstream release (LP: #462016)
    - Incoming message while menu is open freezes X
    - crash when typoing room name
    - Empathy crashes with SIGSEGV when trying spellcheck
    - Empathy protocol chooser shouldn't cache TpConnectionManagerProtocol
    - fixes potential security issue by ensuring that messages are always
      escaped before being displayed in Webkit
  * debian/patches/20_libindicate.patch
    - fixed empathy_tp_chat_acknowledge_message: assertion failed (LP: #408530)
    - added some DEBUG output for better logging
    - Cleaned up a couple glib criticals
  * debian/libempathy-gtk28.symbols
    - Removed symbols related to location manager, they don't apply
  * debian/patches/30_raise_not_toggle.patch
    - toggle contact list visibility with the status icon (LP: #451568)

 -- Ken VanDine <email address hidden> Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:18:50 +0100

I'm running empathy 2.28.1-1ubuntu1 and it still crashes.

Errata: I missed a '.1' in the package version number.

Ubuntu 9.10, Empathy 2.28.1-1ubuntu1.

Happened to me while sending a URL after which the message window froze up. (couldnt scroll the content anymore). As a result I tried to maximize the window upon which the assertion error occured.

This bug was fixed in the package empathy - 2.28.1.1-0ubuntu1

---------------
empathy (2.28.1.1-0ubuntu1) karmic-proposed; urgency=low

  * New upstream release (LP: #462016)
    - Incoming message while menu is open freezes X
    - crash when typoing room name
    - Empathy crashes with SIGSEGV when trying spellcheck
    - Empathy protocol chooser shouldn't cache TpConnectionManagerProtocol
    - fixes potential security issue by ensuring that messages are always
      escaped before being displayed in Webkit
  * debian/patches/20_libindicate.patch
    - fixed empathy_tp_chat_acknowledge_message: assertion failed (LP: #408530)
    - added some DEBUG output for better logging
    - Cleaned up a couple glib criticals
  * debian/libempathy-gtk28.symbols
    - Removed symbols related to location manager, they don't apply
  * debian/patches/30_raise_not_toggle.patch
    - toggle contact list visibility with the status icon (LP: #451568)

 -- Ken VanDine <email address hidden> Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:18:50 +0100

emma48 - please don't just change the bug state without any explanation why you made the change

sorry Chris,

but I did not mention to change any Bug. Just wanted to report one.
Maybe I've clicked the wrong button.

Michi

Chris Coulson wrote:
> emma48 - please don't just change the bug state without any explanation
> why you made the change
>
> ** Changed in: empathy (Ubuntu)
> Status: Fix Committed => Fix Released
>
>

--
Wer Kindern Paläste baut reißt Kerkermauern nieder! Julius Tandler
Who builds palaces to children tear down prison walls!