How might I chase down the root cause of this error message?
(test:1090): GStreamer-CRITICAL **: gst_debug_log_valist: assertion `category != NULL' failed
I am using --gst-debug=GST_REFCOUNTING:5 to debug intermittent issues in the code that can take more than 10 hours to reproduce. The pipeline seems to work fine even with the gst-debug error message. Should I be concerned about the GStreamer-CRITICAL error message?
What I usually do is run the program in gdb with a G_DEBUG=fatal-criticals environment variable (see the Running GLib Applications section of the GLib manual) in gdb and use gdb to get a backtrace... something like
G_DEBUG=fatal-criticals gdb -ex run --args ./test arg1 arg2 ...
If you don't want to actually run the program in gdb you can use a core dump instead.
Once you get a trace you should be able to find the offending code fairly easily. The message might be harmless and/or an issue internal to GStreamer, but I would at least check it out if I were you... criticals like that are often an indicator of a serious issue, like a segfault waiting to happen.
Note that the 1090 in that message likely refers to the PID, not a line number in the generated C.