Another issue I came across in my current adventures in gnome-web-photo land was that gnome-web-photo just stopped running after upgrading up through four different Ubuntu releases. gnome-web-photo crapped out with an error message about the GRE path being wrong, and the only resources on the web were commit messages from when the error message was changed and committed to the gnome-web-photo project.
Digging, digging and a bit more digging led me to suspecting that xulrunner wasn’t behaving as it should. stracing the gnome-web-photo binary (named gnome-web-photo.real on Ubuntu, as gnome-web-photo is a simple wrapper script) revealed that it was attempting to load a difference version of xulrunner than what actually were present (it tried fstat-ing a non-existant directory).
Checking out the current configuration of gre in /etc/gre.d (.. where I’ve never ventured before) indicated that DPKG had left the new package configuration without switching it to the standard configuration. This meant that the old GRE configuration was used, and not the new one. Renaming the old configuration file to gibberish and then removing the suffix from the new one solved the issue.
- Removed: 1.9.1.14.system.conf
- Renamed: 1.9.2.11.system.conf.dpkg-bak to 1.9.2.11.system.conf
.. and now gnome-web-photo actually works again!