Package: padevchooser Version: 0.9.3-2 Severity: important Tags: squeeze I've noticed that sometimes padevchooser fails to start. Looking at previous bug reports, I found #440333 which I admit is rather old but at least it sheds some light on why this happens.
It could be argued that this is not a bug in padevchooser, since it's known that it requires a working avahi-daemon instance in order to start properly (and if that requirement is not satisfied, then the program won't start). However, I think that this is a usability bug and should be fixed. There are at least two scenarios that I can think of: 1) Users launching padvechooser graphically. In this case, when the program fails to start, there's no message indicating why or what happened. Unless a user knows where to look (.xsession-errors), there's absolutely no clue about what went wrong. I think this is unacceptable, since the average user probably doesn't even know where to look (and even if they knew, they shouldn't have to hunt for error messages in log files). Now let's think about a user who knows where to look, and this leads us to the second scenario: 2) Users launching padevchooser through the CLI will find something like this: ** (padevchooser:2438): WARNING **: pa_browser_new() failed. As you can see, in this case there's no clue about the underlying problem either. So this would be the proposed solution: 1) AFAIK, padevchooser is a graphical application, meant to be used on a graphical environment. So if there's a GUI session running, any error messages should be displayed on said GUI (unless there's no way for the program to render a message box, which doesn't seem to be the case). 2) If 1 is absolutely not possible or extremely complicated, the error message that ends up in the log file should at least be clear enough so that an average user can get a clue about what's going on. For example, it wouldn't hurt to have something like "Avahi-daemon is not responding. Please check if it's running.", instead of (or besides) "pa_browser_new() failed". -- System Information: Debian Release: 6.0.3 APT prefers stable-updates APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Versions of packages padevchooser depends on: ii avahi-daemon 0.6.27-2+squeeze1 Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD daemon ii gnome-icon-theme 2.30.3-2 GNOME Desktop icon theme ii libatk1.0-0 1.30.0-1 The ATK accessibility toolkit ii libc6 2.11.2-10 Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib ii libcairo2 1.8.10-6 The Cairo 2D vector graphics libra ii libdbus-1-3 1.2.24-4+squeeze1 simple interprocess messaging syst ii libdbus-glib-1-2 0.88-2.1 simple interprocess messaging syst ii libfontconfig1 2.8.0-2.1 generic font configuration library ii libgconf2-4 2.28.1-6 GNOME configuration database syste ii libglade2-0 1:2.6.4-1 library to load .glade files at ru ii libglib2.0-0 2.24.2-1 The GLib library of C routines ii libgtk2.0-0 2.20.1-2 The GTK+ graphical user interface ii libnotify1 [libnot 0.5.0-2 sends desktop notifications to a n ii liborbit2 1:2.14.18-0.1 libraries for ORBit2 - a CORBA ORB ii libpango1.0-0 1.28.3-1+squeeze2 Layout and rendering of internatio ii libpulse-browse0 0.9.21-3+squeeze1 PulseAudio client libraries (zeroc ii libpulse-mainloop- 0.9.21-3+squeeze1 PulseAudio client libraries (glib ii libpulse0 0.9.21-3+squeeze1 PulseAudio client libraries ii libx11-6 2:1.3.3-4 X11 client-side library ii libxcursor1 1:1.1.10-2 X cursor management library ii libxext6 2:1.1.2-1 X11 miscellaneous extension librar ii libxfixes3 1:4.0.5-1 X11 miscellaneous 'fixes' extensio ii libxi6 2:1.3-6 X11 Input extension library ii libxinerama1 2:1.1-3 X11 Xinerama extension library ii libxml2 2.7.8.dfsg-2+squeeze2 GNOME XML library ii libxrandr2 2:1.3.0-3 X11 RandR extension library ii libxrender1 1:0.9.6-1 X Rendering Extension client libra Versions of packages padevchooser recommends: ii paman 0.9.4-1 PulseAudio Manager ii paprefs 0.9.9-2 PulseAudio Preferences ii pavucontrol 0.9.9-1 PulseAudio Volume Control ii pavumeter 0.9.3-1 PulseAudio Volume Meter padevchooser suggests no packages. -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
