Firefox again (and thunderbird and metacity)

[Jonathan Corbet]

I got annoyed with the continuing tendency of firefox in rawhide to
crash on the wrong site.  I got even annoyed when thunderbird started to
kick the bucket every time the wrong sort of spam came in.  But,
honestly, there is little to compete with the annoyance value of a
metacity crash: you get to watch as six virtual desktops' worth of
windows crowd together and slowly work their way down the screen as
metacity beats its head against the same wall several times in a row.

One could make a disturbing screensaver along those lines.

In each case, non-western fonts set off the problem.  For metacity, it
was a matter of using a working version of firefox to visit a Japanese
site; firefox's setting of the window title would take metacity down.  

Some more time with strace, and I've "fixed" it with the following:

	cd /usr/share/fonts
	mv ja ja.hosed
	ln -s japanese ja

Don't know what state of affairs brought about the confusion, but the
above straightens it out.

Honestly, though...one might think that this software could be just a
little more robust in the face of a missing font file.  

jon