[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#522370: Bug#522370: Bug#518069: Bug#518069: gnome-session: gnome, fails to start after upgrade

[Michael Biebl]

reassign 522370 gnome-session
retitle 522370 gnome-session starts D-Bus session bus the wrong way
thanks

Josselin Mouette wrote:

> Nevertheless, there is a bug in gnome-session: autospawning the D-Bus
> daemon, which is done by the GConf library, leads to race conditions.
> Spawning the daemon if it is not here yet should be the first thing
> gnome-session does. A simpler way might be to throw an error dialog if
> there is no D-Bus daemon, and frankly I’m tempted to do that given the
> amount of bugs you’ll encounter if dbus-daemon is not started before
> gnome-session.


Hi Joss,

I discussed this issue with sjoerd on irc. Here is the log:

> [14:00] <mbiebl> sjoerd: there is also http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=522370
> [14:01] <mbiebl> Which joss asked for explictly
> [14:02] <mbiebl> do you think it's ok?
> [14:02] <sjoerd> let's see
> [14:06] <sjoerd> well
> [14:06] <sjoerd> you don't need to pre-launch the bus
> [14:06] <sjoerd> it's just an optimisation
> [14:06] <mbiebl> apparently the autolaunch is not working as expected
> [14:07] <mbiebl> I vaguely remember a problem where gnome-session did not set the correct environment (variables) if dbus was autospawned
> [14:08] <mbiebl> might actually be a problem of gnome-session though
> [14:09] <sjoerd> well
> [14:11] <mbiebl> fwiw you can easily reproduce the problem by starting your gnome-session with "startx /usr/bin/gnome-session" from the command line
> [14:12] <sjoerd> autolaunching is done when there is no session bus address set
> [14:12] <sjoerd> but it should only launch one bush per session
> [14:13] <sjoerd> and i see only one --autolaunch running
> [14:13] <mbiebl> you are right, I can confirm that
> [14:14] <mbiebl> two gconfd processes, two dbus-daemon --session processes
> [14:14] <mbiebl> but only one with --autolaunch
> [14:14] <sjoerd> hang on
> [14:15] <mbiebl> gnome-session/gsm-dbus.c seems to start it on its own
> [14:15] <sjoerd> doesn't seem to do that in 2.26 anymore
> [14:15] <sjoerd> but that's the problem indeed
> [14:15] <sjoerd> that will break autolaunching
> [14:16] <sjoerd> if it spawns its own it needs to use dbus-launch itself
> [14:16] <sjoerd> does it just execture dbus-daemon by hand ?
> [14:18] <mbiebl>  execlp ("dbus-daemon",
> [14:18] <mbiebl>           "dbus-daemon",
> [14:18] <mbiebl>           "--fork",
> [14:18] <mbiebl>           "--print-address", address_str,
> [14:18] <mbiebl>           "--print-pid", pid_str,
> [14:18] <mbiebl>           "--session",
> [14:18] <mbiebl>           NULL);
> [14:19] <sjoerd> right
> [14:19] <sjoerd> don't do that
> [14:19] <sjoerd> that's what is causing the issue
> [14:19] <sjoerd> dbus-launching does take a bit more time then just looking up the env variable
> [14:19] <sjoerd> but it works transparantly
> [14:19] <sjoerd> unless you do stupid things like that
> [14:20] <sjoerd> that will also break loging into a machine and doing say DISPLAY=:0 rhythmbox-client --pause
> [14:20] <mbiebl> ok, I'll reassign the bug to gnome-session
> [14:20] <mbiebl> with our irc log attached ;-)
> [14:21] <mbiebl> ok?
> [14:21] <sjoerd> sounds fine
> [14:21] <sjoerd> i do see joss point (even after we fix gnome-session)
> [14:21] <sjoerd> but i don't think it's worth it
> [14:22] <sjoerd> given that that will undo the config of people how did actually remove it for a reason


Apparently, gnome-session is starting it's own instance of dbus-daemon and is
doing it "the wrong way". That's why a second instance of dbus-daemon is
auto-launched.

This will also break your gnome-session, if e.g. you start it from the console
via "startx /usr/bin/gnome-session".

So, the best option is, to simply fix gnome-session, thus reassigning.

According to sjoerd, this should already be fixed in upstream gnome-session 2.26.

Cheers,
Michael

-- 
Why is it that all of the instruments seeking intelligent life in the
universe are pointed away from Earth?

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