Thunar 1.8.11 "Emergency" Release Available, Fixes Startup Crashes on FreeBSD, Fedora and Gentoo
Last weeks Thunar 1.8.10 release introduced a Pango version check which makes Thunar crash on startup if the machine is using an older version of the Pango library. This 1.8.11 "emergency release" addresses that particular issue.
Xfce's Thunar file manager browsing some Samba shares
Thunar 1.8.10 had plenty of bug-fixes. It also introduced the minor problem of Thunar crashing on startup on machines running FreeBSD, Gentoo and Fedora 30 (not 31). The following code is the root cause of this total scandal where Thunar crashes on startup if the system's Pango library is not a 1.44.x series version:
standard_view->name_renderer = g_object_new (GTK_TYPE_CELL_RENDERER_TEXT,
"attributes", thunar_pango_attr_disable_hyphens (),
"alignment", PANGO_ALIGN_CENTER,
"xalign", 0.5,
FALSE);
The problem with this code is that thunar_pango_attr_disable_hyphens (), will return a null pointer on Pango versions other than 1.44.x. Software programs will crash with a segmentation fault when you try to read a null pointer.
Xfce and Thunar developer Alexander Schwinn got right on top of this as the complains begun flooding in shortly after Thunar 1.8.10 was released. He had this to say about the new 1.8.11 release:
"Emergency release since thunar might crash on startup due to a nonfunctional version check.
Bugfixes:
- Thunar 1.8.10 crashing on startup in FreeBSD and Fedora, caused by nonfunctional pango version check (Bug #16136, Bug #16138])
Translation Updates:
- Interlingue, Spanish"
Thunar's homepage is at docs.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/start and the latest version is available from archive.xfce.org/src/xfce/thunar/. Distributions who shipped the 1.8.10 release will update to 1.8.11 shortly.
published 2019-11-16 - last edited 2019-11-16
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