Crash in InitializeICUFromDataFile, bug 445616

[Geza Herman]

Hello Chromium developers,

We have chromium integrated into our software, and we have frequent windows crashes in base/i18n/icu_util.cc, InitializeICUFromDataFile (the CHECK macro fails). We cannot reproduce this in-house, we just see that our users experience this crash, so we only have windows minidumps about the issue. I see that this part of the code is marked with http://crbug.com/445616, so there is already a bug created for this issue, however this bug is inaccessible for us because of "Permission denied.". Would it be possible to access this ticket?

(Sorry if this group is not for these kind of requests, if that's the case can you please forward me to the correct place?)

Thanks,

Geza Herman

Formlabs

[Christian Biesinger]

The bug is fairly long (and still open), but it suggests using the
icu_use_data_file=false flag.

Christian

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[Bruce Dawson]

We have the same problem here that we cannot reproduce the bug, but continue to see reports. For some reason the file goes missing. Our best theory is anti-virus, but that's not much of a theory.

The crashes are mostly (83%) on Windows 7, which is a declining share of Chrome's users. The country distribution is not proportional to our users, with India, Russia, and Brazil being #1, #2, and #3. This might just be because Windows 7 is more common in those countries, or it might indicate some other environmental factor.

The "icu_use_data_file=false" flag fix doesn't work, IIRC, because Chrome currently doesn't build with that flag.

The crash count has gradually been dropping and is at historic lows. That, in addition to uncertainty about what to do, is why this hasn't been prioritized more.

If you have any more information about how to trigger the bug then that would be quite helpful. It's hard to know how to deal with files that suddenly disappear.

[Herman, Geza]

I analyzed the issue a little bit deeper, and it turned out the crash happens because Qt is integrated into chromium in our case. icu_util.cc has this additional #ifdef in OpenIcuDataFile:

#if defined(TOOLKIT_QT)
  FilePath data_path;
  PathService::Get(base::DIR_QT_LIBRARY_DATA, &data_path);
  data_path = data_path.AppendASCII(kIcuDataFileName);

And sometimes the data_path returned is wrong (it returns a directory in the user's home instead of our application's resource directory - the added debug lines by you were very helpful to see this).

Does bug 445616 happen with stock chromium (I mean, no Qt integration)? If yes, then our case is a different issue.