Bug#603596: gdm3 seems to have a race condition when loading ~/.face files

[Alexander Kurtz]

Package: gdm3
Version: 2.30.5-5
Severity: minor

Hi,

gdm3 seems to have a race condition when loading ~/.face files: 

When I boot my computer, my user account does not have it's custom icon,
instead the generic icon for users without ~/.face files is displayed. 

However, if I click on my user account to enter my password, but use
escape to return to the main screen, the icon is displayed properly.

The icon will also be properly displayed if I login and logout again. It
will even work if I stop and start gdm3 from a virtual terminal.

I can make the icon *not* appear again, if I fill the file system cache
with other data, for example by using this:
   find /usr/ -type f -exec md5sum {} \;

After that, gdm3 will not display my custom icon until it is loaded the
second time.

This behavior seems to suggest a race condition, because everything
works when ~/.face is already cached.

Please note three things:
1) I didn't experience that problem with 2.30.5-4. It started with
    2.30.5-5. However, that probably only means that some change in
    the later version triggered the race condition.
2) This machine does have a very slow hard drive (~30 MB/s read speed)
3) This machine does only have 1 GiB ram.

Let me know if you need any further information to reproduce the
problem!

Best regards

Alexander Kurtz
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