Re: [Evolution] Evolution causes reboot, where should I look for debugging?

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

On Fri, 2020-08-21 at 20:37 -0400, Paulo Cesar G. Costa wrote:
> All:
>
> I have been experiencing an annoying issue for about a week now that is
> getting worse. Basically, when I try to close an open draft message,
> the moment I click the "x" button to close it my computer reboots. 

If it's just started happening in the last weeks, has evolution been
updated at all in that time?  What about any of the Gnome and GTK
components?

> I have been using Evolution in this computer since I bought it last
> year. The laptop itself is quite reliable, never ran Windows (I
> stripped the original SSD), and nothing else produces this weird
> reboot. I pushed other heavy apps to the limits and was not able to get
> this reboot issue.

It's unusual for an application to cause a Linux computer to reboot -
almost always it is down to a hardware issue (usually bad memory).

> I think it should be some sort of incompatibility between Evo and some
> gnome extension, but I do not know how to verify my guesses

Turn off the extensions and re-enable them one by one.

But that would probably only cause Gnome Shell to die, not reboot the
whole machine.

> I would like to debug, but do not know how to start. For instance, the
> Environment Variables page (https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evolution)
> tells me to set a variable such as:
> CAMEL_DEBUG=imapx:io evolution >& logfile (for imap, as I have 8 imap
> accounts and 2 ews)
>
> So I added it to my .zshrc file. Yet, I am not sure what it does. That
> is, when the variable is set, does it create new logs? Make existing
> logs better? Which logs? 

The debugging output is on the standard out/error of the application;
in standard Gnome those outputs are not recorded anywhere.  That's why
the instructions say to run evolution from the command line and
redirect the outputs to a file.

I don't think it's a good idea to globally set those variables - the
output can get voluminous especially with 8 IMAP accounts so if things
are recorded anywhere you are going to get lots of it.

> In short, to provide more useful info for tracking down a problem,
> where should I go? Are there specific logs.

No, just the output when you run evolution from the command line.

> I recognize this is likely a very dumb question, but I am a bit stuck.
I don't think you will get much from any of the logs - if the machine
really does crash and reboot then it's unlikely things will have had
time to be written to the logs - if the machine crashes it can't write!

You should probably run some hardware diagnostic tests on the machine -
many modern machines have such things built into the BIOS.

You also need to see if anything relevant has changed in the OS updates
recently - possibly roll back any recent changes. It might be prudent
to verify that the installed packages are the same as when they were
first installed (to make sure they haven't got corrupted - which in
itself would indicate a bad disk!).

P.