Bug 400272

I was unable to fix the status of Bug 400093 so I'm continuing it here.

The basic problem is that Dolphin immediately crashes upon startup if ~/.local/share/kxmlgui5/dolphin/dolphinui.rc is malformed. According to Elvis Angelaccio, this is due to a limitation in kxmlgui. I have filed a corresponding issue for kxmlgui: Bug 400271

Replying to Elvis Angelaccio's message from Bug 400093:

"There is an abort() in kxmlgui if the xml file has a wrong syntax."

If that's true, then that's clearly a major shortcoming of kxmlgui. In this case, the correct course of action is not to mark this a non-bug, but rather to open an issue for kxmlgui to support optionally dealing with bad XML in a way other than crashing the entire application (see below) and to mark that issue as blocking this one.


"There is nothing we can do to prevent the crash, as that file is used to build the whole GUI and must be correct."

That is clearly not true. For example, kxmlgui can first be fixed to add optional support for handling bad XML in a way other than crashing, after which, Dolphin can be fixed to do any one or more of the following (and these are just off the top of my head):

A. Present a dialog informing the user that ~/.local/share/kxmlgui5/dolphin/dolphinui.rc is malformed. Maybe even show some basic information about the error, such as line number. So the user actually knows what went wrong and why, and at least has some hope of doing something about it, rather than being left with what appears to be (and may as well be, from their perspective) a fatally broken piece of software.

B. Start Dolphin anyway, using the default configuration Dolphin already uses when no dolphinui.rc is found. So the user can at least still use the application if they need to.

C. (Maybe) Rename the corrupted dolphinui.rc to a backup name, so it doesn't continue to cause problems.