Created attachment 185144 [details] Video demonstation of the issue SUMMARY Few months ago Cisco started to block additional regions (see https://github.com/cisco/openh264/issues/3886) and currently many Ukrainian users are not able to finish installation of the "org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264" package from Flathub. This also uncovered issue with the KDE Discover. If user have "Automatic updates" enabled, they might get nasty notification spam. For at least a minute, the computer becomes unusable until Discover crashes. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Open /etc/hosts and block access to the "openh264" host 127.0.0.1 ciscobinary.openh264.org 2. Install Flathub package that depends on the "org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264" flatpak install flathub com.obsproject.Studio 3. Notice that "org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264" wasn't installed due to the unreachable "openh264" host 4. Open Discover, go to Settings, open hamburger menu, select "Configure Updates...". 5. Set "Update software" to "Automatically", set "Update frequency" to "Daily" 6. Wait several minutes OBSERVED RESULT Automatic updates continuously tries to update/install "org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264" and fails. These actions are extremely frequent. Discover constantly steals focus to shows the error message, windows and notifications flash etc. Users can't easily stop this. They have to either wait until Discover crashes or hard reset computer. EXPECTED RESULT Discover shouldn't continuously retry to install the package and show the same error. There should be a single attempt like it happens when users tries to update manually. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Linux/KDE Plasma: Fedora Kinoite 42/43 KDE Plasma Version: 6.4.5 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.18.0 Qt Version: 6.9.2 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Fedora 43 KDE is going to enable "Automatic updates", so I expect that many users will have this issue.
Sigh, what an unpleasant issue. :/
*** Bug 508943 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 508975 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
before i test this, what is the actual way to fix it? remove the hosts listing presumably. and why would users have that line anyway and be installing a dependant project?
hmm. seems to have worked for me: flatpak install flathub com.obsproject.Studio Looking for matches… Required runtime for com.obsproject.Studio/x86_64/stable (runtime/org.kde.Platform/x86_64/6.8) found in remote flathub Do you want to install it? [Y/n]: Info: runtime org.kde.Platform branch 6.8 is end-of-life, with reason: We strongly recommend moving to the latest stable version of the Platform and SDK Info: applications using this runtime: com.obsproject.Studio com.obsproject.Studio permissions: ipc network fallback-x11 pulseaudio wayland x11 devices file access [1] dbus access [2] [1] host, xdg-config/kdeglobals:ro, xdg-run/pipewire-0 [2] com.canonical.AppMenu.Registrar, org.a11y.Bus, org.freedesktop.Flatpak, org.freedesktop.Notifications, org.kde.KGlobalSettings, org.kde.StatusNotifierWatcher, org.kde.kconfig.notify, org.kde.kdeconnect ID Branch Op Remote Download 1. [✓] com.obsproject.Studio.Locale stable i flathub 2.1 kB / 47.0 kB 2. [✓] org.kde.Platform.Locale 6.8 i flathub 18.8 kB / 409.7 MB 3. [✓] org.kde.Platform 6.8 i flathub 198.6 MB / 396.0 MB 4. [✓] com.obsproject.Studio stable i flathub 205.6 MB / 212.3 MB Installation complete.
I've tested this recently, and don't see an update loop following the steps to reproduce. Is anyone still able to reproduce this?
The update loop is only seen by people in Russia, Belarus, and parts of Ukraine, which are (or Cisco believes to be) under US sanctions, and therefore barred by those sanctions from downloading Cisco's H.264 media codec. The problem not not that this happens — it's an unavoidable geopolitical issue — but rather that Discover doesn't handle itself very well when it happens. It's likely going to be difficult to reproduce the Discover issues in the future since IIRC apps are moving away from the runtime that includes this sanctionable software. But in principle the issues could happen again due to future geopolitical matters if Discover doesn't harden itself against them.