Osmo fails with Pipelight Installed

Updated Ubuntu bug 1297872. Have found that the call to webkit_web_view_new() from the Osmo function calendar.c is allowing some Pipelight code (plugin??) to execute. Believe this is resulting in an Osmo configuration area being overlaid which results in an invalid window and Segmentation fault in Osmo.

Hi,

Pipelight does not use any GTK components, we completely rely on pure libX11 api commands and they only get active after a plugins was initialized. Loading Pipelight into a process is not enough to trigger any X11 communication. Osmo would need to actually use a plugin like Flash or Silverlight so that Pipelight would create a window for it. I currently can not image a way how Pipelight could interfere with your application. Nevertheless, we try to check whether we can reproduce this problem.

Michael

Hi,

I just wanted to reproduce this bug report, but at least with my testing environment (Ubuntu 12.04, Pipelight 0.2.6, Osmo 0.2.10+svn922-2) I'm not able to reproduce any problem. Do you know if this problem maybe only exists in newer version of Osmo?

The bug report you have linked above doesn't exist btw or I don't have permission to view it. If the bug indeed exists it would be nice to give us from the pipelight team also permission to view it, so we can take a closer look. Otherwise it would be nice to send us some more instructions how to reproduce the issue (for example via mail, if it contains confidential data).

Regards,
Sebastian

I'm just a public tester of 14.04 and a user of Osmo and Pipelight. I think I changed the but report to public so take a look. I believe the problem is that the Osmo was compiled and distributed on 14.04 with some other level of libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 and that was updated for Pipelight and that resulted in an overlay of some configuration area in Osmo. This is just my speculation but I sure that running the 14.04 distribution level of Osmo when Pipelight is installed will result in an invalid information in the Osmo configuration file.

I reproduced this problem on two 14.04 systems. One test is on my desktop where Pipelight was not installed and Osmo was working. I installed Pipelight and got it working and then tried Osmo and got the failure. Removed Pipelight and then Osmo was working again.

As you can see from the debug out from my bug the Pipelight code gets executed on the call to webkit_web_view_new() which doesn't make any sense to me. I don't see any reason for Osmo to interface with Pipelight. As of yet no one involved with Osmo has responded to any bug/questions I have posed.

By the way, this is the first response I've received on any bug/question I've posed on this problem. I've spent 2 weeks talking to myself. Thanks for responding.

Hi,

the reason why Pipelight gets active is that Webkit loads all plugins to enumerate which kind of mimetypes are supported (i.e. Flash videos, Silverlight applications, ...). I don't know exactly what goes wrong in your case, but I would suggest Osmo to simply disable plugins in Webkit if they do not need them. From a security point of view they should definitely disable them, otherwise it may be for example possible to embed a malicious flash video into a note.

I am not very familiar with using webkit as library, but i think they will need to set this setting to false:
http://webkitgtk.org/reference/webkitgtk/stable/WebKitWebSettings.html#WebKitWebSettings--enable-plugins

Other programs like for example Liferea (a RSS reader) allow to disable / enable browser plugins in their settings and they also use Webkit.

Most browsers start plugins in a separate process to avoid crashing the main process. It may therefore be possible that we have some bug inside our code which will only occurs if the plugin is loaded into the main process, but looking through the source code I was not able to find anything which could cause such a problem.

Michael

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