[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#1018880: dbus-user-session: GNOME applications such as evince and nautilus start with a 25-second delay via ssh

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2022-09-07 09:19:26 +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:
> On Thu, 01 Sep 2022 at 12:22:28 +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> > I first noticed that when I connect by ssh, evince is very slow to
> > start. A "strace -f -ttt evince" shows a 15-second timeout followed
> > by a 10-second timeout, thus a 25-second delay, before the window
> > appears.
> 
> Please describe your exact scenario in more detail. For instance, are you
> already logged in as the same user on a graphical console, or on a tty,
> or in some other way? If yes, what desktop environment, display manager,
> etc. are in use? Or are you assembling your own graphical environment from
> individual components such as startx?

There is no graphical console: the machine is accessible only via ssh.
I can reproduce the problem when killing all my processes with
"kill -TERM -1", relogging via ssh, and starting evince.

Note: I can see that the following processes are created just after
evince is started (but still waiting for its window):
xdg-desktop-portal, xdg-document-portal, xdg-permission-store.

> If you're expecting graphical applications to work "when I connect by
> ssh", then presumably you're doing *something* that you're not saying,
> either X11-over-ssh forwarding or a separate X11 session or a separate
> Wayland session - otherwise these applications would have nowhere to
> display their windows.

X11 forwarding. I do not use Wayland at all.

> It might help to try to reproduce a minimal version of the same problem
> in a virtual machine, perhaps starting from one of the Debian Live images.

Do you mean something like the following?

  https://linuxhint.com/install_debian10_virtualbox/

> > A comment at
> > https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/676410/evince-is-slow-to-open
> > based on information from https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=224787
> > (ssh is actually not involved at these URLs) says to run
> > 
> >   dbus-update-activation-environment --systemd \
> >     DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS DISPLAY XAUTHORITY
> 
> This might help, or it might make things worse, depending where you run
> it from and under what circumstances. I cannot know without more detail
> of what scenario you are trying to fix.
> 
> In a Debian X11 environment, /etc/X11/Xsession.d/20dbus_xdg-runtime is
> meant to do something similar for you, so if you are in an X11 environment
> where that's not working, either something has gone wrong somewhere or
> your X11 environment is not participating in Debian's system-integration
> mechanisms.

But /etc/X11/Xsession.d/20dbus_xdg-runtime isn't run via ssh, AFAIK.

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent at vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
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Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)