Bug#956523: mousetweaks ends with segmentation fault

[smcv at debian.org]

Control: forwarded -1 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mousetweaks/-/issues/8

On Sun, 12 Apr 2020 at 12:50:42 +0200, Gero Treuner wrote:
> I'm using Gnome with Wayland (but stacktrace doesn't look like the
> issue is in that area anyway).

mousetweaks only supports X11, not Wayland. Please use the "GNOME on Xorg"
session type if you require the mouse accessibility features that it
provides ("hover click" and "simulated secondary click").

The crash[1] appears to be because mousetweaks assumes that the default
GDK display is X11. There is a merge request available upstream[2]
to make it exit more or less gracefully when run in a Wayland session,
instead of just crashing.

However, it will likely never *work* under Wayland, because in a Wayland
environment, ordinary client programs do not have sufficient control over
the compositor to do what mousetweaks does. In a Wayland environment,
the mouse accessibility features that mousetweaks provides have to be
implemented as part of the compositor itself, which was done in GNOME
3.34.x (for both Wayland and X11) and will be available as part of
Debian 11.

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mousetweaks/-/issues/8
[2] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mousetweaks/-/merge_requests/3

> It looks to me that mousetweaks is founded on outdated Gnome bases and
> is not fit to serve for this purpose anymore.

As far as I know, it should still work in an X11 environment, such as
"GNOME on Xorg". It's also used by the GNOME-derived Cinnamon environment,
which I believe is purely an X11 environment and does not implement a
Wayland compositor, for their equivalent feature.

On Sun, 19 Jul 2020 at 22:05:16 +0300, Emre Uyguroglu wrote:
> See [1]https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-build-meta/-/merge_requests/269
> The package should be dropped, it still ships with SID and segfaults as well
> same functionality is provided by "gnome-control-center -> universal access->
> click assist" now

In testing/unstable, you are correct to say that GNOME no longer needs
this. A future gnome-control-center upload will remove the Recommends.
It seems to still be used by Cinnamon, so I've opened a separate bug
asking whether the Cinnamon maintainers want to take over maintenance
of mousetweaks. If they do not, then yes, it should probably be dropped.

    smcv