foomatic-db-gutenprint causes printer setup malfunctioning

I can confirm that this causes the same problem on another person's computer; I loaded an Ubuntu Dapper Live Flight 5 CD and upgraded the foomatic packages and got the same error. Uninstalling foomatic-db-gutenprint made it work again.

This bug still exists in foomatic-db-gutenprint version 5.0.0~rc2-0ubuntu5

$ foomatic-gui
*** glibc detected *** double free or corruption (!prev): 0x0815f178 ***
Unable to read printer database.

after removal of the package, normal functionality is restored.

5.0.0~rc2-0ubuntu6 causes the same problems; removing it fixes them, as it did before.

We recently upgraded to this version of foomatic-db:

foomatic-db (20060408-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * New upstream release.
  * Suggest hpijs-ppds instead of hplip-ppds. (Closes: #361126)
  * New database seems to be missing whatever problem was causing the
    double-free bug in foomatic-configure and friends.
    (Closes: #360785, #360787)

 -- Chris Lawrence <email address hidden> Sat, 8 Apr 2006 05:01:31 -0400

foomatic-gui and friends work fine now.

I am still experiencing this problem, so no, it is not fixed in Ubuntu. I am using the most up to date version from the repositories (e.g. foomatic-db 20060408-1ubuntu1). I tried reinstalling foomatic*, but it did not work. I tried uninstalling and then reinstalling foomatic* but that did not work either.

The only way for me to get foomatic-gui to work is to uninstall foomatic-db-gutenprint.

It is still not working though :)

Last comment was me changing the status.

Does it work after doing

  sudo foomatic-cleanupdrivers

?

Yes, it did, thank you! =D

First I ran sudo foomatic-cleanupdrivers
here was the output from that, BTW:

---
PM760pl.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
PM820pl.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
Stc680pl.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
Stc760pl.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
Stc777pl.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
Stp720pl.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
Stp870pl.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
bj8gc12f.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
bj8hg12f.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
bj8oh06n.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
bj8pp12f.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
bj8ts06n.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
bjc6000b1.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
bjc610a1.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
bjc610a2.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
bjc610a3.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
bjc610a4.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
bjc610a5.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
bjc610a6.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
bjc610a7.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
bjc610a8.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
bjc610b1.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
bjc610b2.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
bjc610b3.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
bjc610b4.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
bjc610b6.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
bjc610b7.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
bjc610b8.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
capt.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
cljet5c.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
gimp-print.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
gutenprint.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
iwlo.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
iwlq.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
la70t.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
lbp660.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
lj5mono.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
lxm3200m.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
lxm3200p.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
lxx74.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
m2300w.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
m2400w.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
necp2x6.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
nwp533.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
omni.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
pbm2ppa.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
pegg.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
pxlcolor.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
ras1.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
ras24.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
ras3.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
ras32.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
ras4.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
ras8m.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
s400b1.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
slap.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
sparc.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
st640ihg.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
st640p.upp.xml has an empty command line, deleted!
st640pg.upp.xml has an empty command line, delete...

(Maybe into foomatic-db-gimp-print since its a transitional package?)

> foomatic-gui runs normally now :)

As I expected, thanks for checking again!

> So what was the cause of this? Residual stuff leftover from my upgrade from Breezy? If so, should (can?) this command be added into one of the packages as part of the upgrade?

It'll only affect users which had the earlier broken dapper version installed and should not affect upgrades from breezy. Therefore I think this bug report can be closed.

Sadly, this bug needs to be reopened; I was testing a Dapper Live CD with a printer at a friend's house and noticed that it was present. I was able to duplicate the problem at home. To reproduce:

Run the latest Ubuntu Dapper Live CD (6.06.1), add universe to sources.list, press reload in Synaptic, install foomatic-gui and run it from Terminal. You will get the "double free or corruption" error.

Fortunately sudo foomatic-cleanupdrivers still works to fix matters, allowing foomatic-gui to then run normally, but having to cleanup the drivers means there's a problem with the package (still? a regression perhaps?).

Perhaps add foomatic-cleanupdrivers to a postinstall script?

FYI, I just tested the same procedure with the original Dapper release Live CD (6.06) and it also has the "double free or corruption" problem.

Note that a virgin (not treated by any patches or programs, like for example foomatic-cleanupdrivers) Foomatic database can have driver entries with empty command line. These are simply entries which do not provide PPD files to be generated via foomatic-db-engine. Most important type of such drivers are

- Native CUPS drivers: They bring their own PPDs, usually generated by CUPS DDK
- Drivers which bring their own Foomatic XML files: The driver XML file in foomatic-db is only to make these drivers appear on the linuxprinting.org web site.
- Drivers for which there is more than one driver XML file: In this case only one of the XML files produces PPDs, the others only contain a text hint telling which is the one producing PPDs.

As empty or missing driver command lines are legal in the Foomatic XML data format, every program using Foomatic should be able to handle this. All programs which come with Foomatic do so.

Printer setup tools should be able to cope with this, either by only showing printer/driver combos for which a PPD can be generated (or is ready-made in /usr/share/ppd) or by producing an error message if a bad combo is selected.

I move this bug to foomatic-gui, as it seems that only this program breaks on empty driver command lines. But please check also whether other printer tools like, gnome-cups-manager, KDE Printing Manager, CUPS web interface, ... have the same problem.

How does foomatic-gui determine the available printer/driver combos? If it calls "foomatic-combo-xml -O" for that, update to the newest snapshot of foomatic-db-engine from linuxprinting.org (Edgy package in progress) and change to the new "foomatic-combo-xml -C". Then only printer/driver combos which give a valid PPD file are shown.

I have done changes in foomatic-db upstream so that it can be built without the driver XML file with empty command lines, without driver XMLs for obsolete drivers, and/or even only with driver XMLs for drivers which are recommended for at least one printer. In the newest Ubuntu package I have built this foomatic-db with driver entries for obsolete drivers and with empty command lines excluded. So the problem of printer setup tools breaking on driver XMLs with empty command lines should be solved by that. But note that this is more a workaround than a fix, the setup toools need to be fixed as suggested in my two previous comments.

foomatic-gui now doesn't crash any more in current Jaunty.