Pacman/Terminal crashes

Question

hi there,
sorry for my first post being an issue, but consider my silentness as a sign for my happiness with arch and for it's greatness.
i recently stumbled over some strange issues when running pacman -Syu in terminal (extra/terminal). sometimes either terminal crashes or pacman crashes and takes terminal with it. i don't know since i did not find anything in any log file. also terminal never crashes when running something else than pacman.
after that i have to remove pacmans lock-file and usually get an error by pacman, something like:
"error: /var/lib/pacman/local/kde-common-3.5.4-2/desc: No such file or directory"
repeated several times. up until now it always where kde or gnome packages, but that could just be a coincidence. it's easy to fix, a pacman -Sf <bad_package> will do and i can continue with pacman -Su, but annoying nevertheless.
any ideas on what i might have done wrong and how to fix this? thanks.

Answer 1

Hmm, now I know what's wrong on your system.
Terminal uses a dbus session bus. Both kde-common and gnome-common update files in the dbus session configuration, which causes dbus to segfault. This is a bug I hate in dbus and should get fixed before updating to gnome 2.16. (I can't start new epiphany from my gnome panel now due to it, stupid dbus update).
When dbus segfaults, two things can happen: your program will crash immediately as terminal does, or crash whenever it wants to do the next DBUS operation, which epiphany does on exit, it tries to close a dbus connection to a dead server.
I hope to get this thingy fixed with dbus 0.92.