Re: bad voodoo with gconfd-2 and gdm

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas apestaart org>]

Hey Bastien,

> > > I don't know why gdm is starting it - probably some side effect from
> > > libgnomeui? libgnomeui tends to do things that don't make sense for
> > > weird apps like gdm.
> > 
> > gdm is the most likely candidate at this point, since nothing much else is 
> > running at start-up.
> 
> As I already said on IRC, and I'm repeating here, I don't see why gconf
> would be running for your user because of gdm.

I agree, I don't see that either.  But I can't see any other candidate.
Here's a snippet of my process table after a fresh boot into initlevel 5, 
with gdm running, but without logging into it :

root      1324  0.8  1.1 10148 2832 ?        S    10:11   0:00 
/usr/bin/gdm-binary -nodaemon
root      1360  0.1  1.1 10152 3000 ?        S    10:11   0:00 
/usr/bin/gdm-binary -nodaemon
root      1361  7.9  5.5 33680 14192 ?       S    10:11   0:01 
/usr/X11R6/bin/X :0 -auth /var/gdm/:0.Xauth
thomas    1370  0.3  0.8  3596 2076 ?        S    10:12   0:00 
/usr/libexec/gconfd-2 4
gdm       1376 13.1  5.0 18608 12920 ?       S    10:12   0:01 
/usr/bin/gdmgreeter

Somewhere between starting gdm-binary and gdmgreeter, gconfd-2 gets 
executed, as my most-used user, without me having specified user "thomas" 
anywhere.
So any hints I can try to find out why this happens are greatly 
appreciated ;) something is seriously wrong here.  Maybe there is some way 
I can tell gconfd-2 to be more verbose about it's logging, to find out who 
asked for a gconf key ?

> On my machine, gdm runs as root (and certainly doesn't start gconf, but
> that's not something I would bet my life on). I guess you're not running
> your desktop as root, so how would gdm start up a version of gconfd as
> your user ?

Indeed !

> Just remove gconf and the packages depending on it from /usr/, that's
> the easiest way.

It's not that I don't know how to work around it.  It's an issue that I 
suspect other people also have, and if they had the same ugly problems I 
had, I can imagine all of them tearing their hair out at this crappy and 
buggy gnome2 thing.  So I want to hunt this problem down and eliminate it 
or at least get it into FAQS for other people to know about.

The irritating thing about this "bug" is that it's not an obvious one.  It 
doesn't result in system crashes or anything, which would be fairly easy 
to report.  For me it resulted in all of the below :
- all of nautilus's side panes not being able to start
- all graphical images of the battery applet not showing
- the tasklist being invisible because of zero width
- metacity not responding to alt-tab
- none of the keybindings could be configured from the preferences menu
(and a few other problems as well).

None of these are critical or crashers, but they ARE very important, and 
they're very non-obvious.

BTW, removing GConf2 from my /usr system is not an option anyway as long 
as I'll be making GStreamer packages and testing them out myself.
It *is* possible to run gnome stuff from separate prefixes, so this is 
just one (very deeply hidden) bug that needs to be solved, not worked 
around.

Thomas

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