bad voodoo with gconfd-2 and gdm

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas apestaart org>]

Hi all,

I have a perplexing problem that's been irritating me for the past month 
and I think I finally figured it out.
The symptom was that all sorts of weird stuff wouldn't work anymore - 
alt-tab in metacity, default values for applets, battery applet not 
showing anything, and so on.

After lots of experimenting, I noticed the problem was with gconfd-2 and 
gdm.

Specifically, I run stock rh73 with ximian gnome and gnome2 snaphots (I 
install these rpms to test gstreamer stuff from rpms).
I run GNOME 2 from the excellent garnome install, which has everything 
with /home/thomas/garnome as prefix.

Now, what happens is that gdm, which I still run from the RPM as usual, 
for some reason starts up gconfd-2.  Of course, it starts the gconfd-2 
from /usr, not from /home/thomas/garnome, so my gnome desktop I log into 
also uses the /usr gconfd-2, and this was the cause of all my trouble.
When manually shutting it down and running the right gconfd-2, then 
logging in, everything is ok.

Now, I did the following :
a) a fresh reboot
b) let the system bring up gdm (in init level 5)
c) check for gconfd-2 in the process list (after some idle time, it gets 
started)
d) cd /proc
   find . -name maps -exec grep -H gconf {} \; | grep usr
   to find all of the processes that have loaded libgconf-2
   check the processes in question.

They are gdmgreeter, gdm-binary-nodaemon, and gconfd-2, all from /usr

Now, hadess tells me that gdm is compiled against it, but shouldn't 
actually invoke it.  So, in theory, gconfd-2 shouldn't even be started as 
this point !

I'm a bit stumped as to what I can do next, so I'd appreciate some input.

Ideally, I'd like to
a) keep running gdm from the installed rpm
b) be able to select my session from gdm, be it either my garnome setup, 
my gnome1 setup, or my gnome2 setup from ximian snapshots.  In the case of 
garnome, it should ideally start up gconfd-2 from /home/thomas/garnome, 
and in the case of gnome2 ximian snapshots, from /usr

I notice that gconfd-2 shuts itself down after some amount of time 
(approx. 10 seconds).  Would this interfere with this whole process if I 
manage to shut down one gnome session and log in in another quickly enough 
? Shouldn't we check against this sort of stuff ? Come to think of it, 
shouldn't gdm bring down any gconfd-2 daemon running ?

I'm bringing this up here since some people might know better than me how 
all of the various components work together.

Let me know what more I could do to debug this, or how I could tackle this 
problem (besides doing quick hacks like starting up gconfd-2 anyway from 
the right dir ;))

Thomas

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