houston, we have a problem- 2.10 showstoppers

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

OK, all... we've been nagging about the showstoppers for a while now
and had medium-to-poor success on them. By my count:

http://tinyurl.com/657ob

We're now down to 7, one or two of which are puntable, but many of
which are extremely embarassing and some of which even have patches.
Yes, some of these have been around for ages, but when someone points
out you've pissed your pants, 'Don't worry, I did it yesterday' is not
really acceptable :)

First, bugs with patches or apparently easy fixes that someone needs to Just Do:

116814 	Splash screen doesn't disappear- basically, we've got a
mega-long timeout here that makes it appear to casual users (i.e.,
most of them) that we're broken, and drives non-casual users out of
their skulls.

122150 	gnome-termnal 2.4.0.1 won't "redraw" text lines properly-
redrawing is broken and has been for a long time. Given that vte is
defacto unmaintained, and there is a patch that has been tested for a
while now in gentoo, this just needs someone to commit and roll a new
tarball.

The bug we have a handle on- go elijah go!
166722: gnome_url_show needs to use startup-notification and take a
timestamp parameter- basically, this is the 'when i open a webpage
from xchat, the browser never pops to the front' bug. Given how much
work has been put in to fix focus, we shouldn't be shipping with
something that affects external users so much.

Bugs that we appear to have no clue about, but which are high
visibility/high dup count:

121782 applet dies at logout- this appears to be happening to several
applets, and may or may not have common cause. It would be great if
Smart People (tm) started looking at this. Given that the actual user
impact is small (it is 'merely' embarassing to us) I'd strongly
consider punting this one, but c'mon... it makes us look bad.

146483 Nautilus crashed when I dragged a folder from one place to
another. lots of dups, no apparent traction.

146075 	Crash while adding images to desktop- there are a ton of dups
here, and it can still be duplicated in 2.9.90, apparently.

146297 	nautilus crashed after some navigating- ton of dups, and alex
has a theory, but we need more information. This is a chance for
someone to do some investigating and help out.

That is about it; not nearly as bad as it was a while ago- thanks to
everyone who has dived into the code and helped out.

Elijah wrote a great summary of the bugs which have been removed from
the list since the last report to d-d-l; I've attached it here.

Anyway, happy hunting-
Luis

Contents
  Summary
  Bugs fixed since the last update
  Bugs removed from the 2.10 list since last time
  Non-regression bugs that remain on the list
  Bugs new to 2.9.x that remain on the list

Summary

  The new updated list shows 7 open possible showstoppers.  Of those,
  2 are in nautilus, and there are 1 each in gnome-panel, gnome-session, libgnome, 
  gnome-applets, and vte.  The full list of bugs can be found at
  http://tinyurl.com/657ob

Bugs fixed (or at least "fixed") since the last update:
  This list of fixed bugs isn't complete as there are quite a few bugs
  listed in the other lists that are actually believed to be fixed
  (and a couple more that have patches available to fix the relevant
  issues).

  Control center
    #146130 (background) : crash with incorrect UTF-8 filename
    #146645 (background) : gnome-background-properties crashes

  gnome-panel
    #163501 : Synchronize the main menu layout with new menu bar layout

  gnome-print
    #157829 : print list should be populated asyncronously

  gtk+
    #166379 : Problems with gtk_window_present()
    (The bug is still open, but the issue important for gnome 2.10 has
    been fixed)

Bugs removed from the 2.10 list since last time:

  Control Center
    #166987 (shell) : CC Graphical shell window freeze when resized
    Wasn't agreed it was a showstopper

  gnome-volume-manager
    #158718 : crash during apt-get upgrade
    Was determined to be Ubuntu-specific

  <filed as metacity, but a tracker across all kinds of desktop components>
    #149028 : Focus stealing bugs roundup
    Pretty much the major bugs have been fixed; 166722 and 167630
    still remain, but 166722 is on the 2.10 showstopper list
    independently and 167630 isn't a reason to consider it a
    showstopper (that bug also has a partial patch)

  Yelp
    #157941 : Help browser content is inaccessible [REGRESSION]
    Punted to 2.12 since we're using yelp-2.6 for the third release in
    a row.

  libwnck
    #160977 (tasklist) : the window list applet does not use available space
    Vincent attached a patch that fixes the issue.  I've been running
    with the patch without any problems.  :-)

  Control center
    #102149 (theme-manager) : List does not refresh after "Save theme"   
    This bug was originally filed against Gnome 2.1.x; it has a
    recurring "Okay, we thing we fixed it now" and "sorry, that
    doesn't work, I can still trigger this issue by doing <x>"
    problem.  However, it currently seems to be open only because
    #102216 is???

    #102216 (theme-manager) : Icon themes install into ~/.themes
      instead of ~/.icons
    Originally filed during Gnome 2.1.x, it looked like it had finally
    been fixed this cycle, but Vincent reported finding at least one
    lingering issue--needing to restart the theme manager in order to
    see the new theme

    #149236 (theme-manager) : crash opening gnome-theme-manager
      [top_theme_dir_changed]
    Reported towards the end of Gnome 2.7.x.  This is believed to be
    fixed; Kjartan has asked for anyone that has gotten the crashes
    before to check if they still can; no one has in about two and a
    half weeks so far.

  nautilus
    #145789 : Nautilus crashes on closing root window
    This is believed fixed.  Originally filed against 2.6.x.

    #145971 : nautilus crash [nautilus_desktop_link_get_link_type]
    Filed in 2.6.x but it appears that there were only one or two
    dupes from then and that most dupes are from 2.9.x.  Alex
    committed a patch that he believes may fix this issue.

  libegg
    #164359 (recent-files) : recently-used breaks gedit
    Incorrect .recently-used makes gedit crash.  This bug has already been
    fixed on the gnome-vfs side, according to comment #7. A few
    patches and fixes in this bug could still be applied to egg-recent, but 
    those don't make it a showstopper any longer.
    
    #165231 (recent-files) : Panel started crashing!
    Incorrect syntax in recently-used makes the panel crash. To fix,
    egg-recent needs to check for invalid XML. However, since this basically 
    requires manually creating invalid XML (as far as we know) we've removed 
    this from the showstopper list.

    #165506 (recent-files) : Memory leak in EggRecentModel::set_properties
    PATCH Still here !
    Like the title says. A patch is attached to the bug that plugs the leak.
    Just needs committing, but is not big enough to warrant stopping the release.



Non-regression bugs that remain on the list

  gnome-applets
    #121782 (stickynotes) : applet dies at logout
    Originally filed against 2.3.x, but it looks like it was recently
    (during 2.8.x and 2.9.x) discovered to be a more general problem
    with any applet.  This bug goes mostly unnoticed as it happens at
    logout, and doesn't prevent the logout from completing.  Comment
    #26 suggests a possible way of investigation. An increasing number
    of reports are coming out.

  gnome-panel (but maybe gdk)
    #146075 : Crash while adding images to desktop 
    Originally filed under 2.6.x.  Words from Vincent on the bug, "It
    seems there are two bugs here. One had already been reported as
    bug #128317. There's a patch attached to this bug that seems to
    fix it.  However it just replaces a gdk_pixbuf_get_from_drawable()
    with some code that should be equivalent but does not crash. I did
    not have time to look further at this, but I'm wondering if this
    might be a GDK bug..."

  gnome-session
    #116814 : Splash screen doesn't disappear
    Originally filed against 2.3.x.  With badly managed apps, the
    timeout is so long that people think their machine has frozen when
    trying to login.  Really severe, but we seem to just throw our
    hands up in the air every release since it doesn't affect "normal"
    apps.  An easy band-aid could be used to at least lessen the
    severity (lower the timeout for the splash screen display)

  nautilus
    #146297 (sidebar panel : Tree) : nautilus crashed after some
      navigating
    Crash with a dozen+ of duplicates. Last crash occurred with 2.8.1.
    Currently needs info from one of the reporters.

    #146483 : Nautilus crashed when I dragged a folder from one place
    to another on the desktop
    10 dups. Last dup with 2.8.2.  No clear way of fixing this bug.
    
  vte
    #122150 (VteTerminal) : gnome-termnal 2.4.0.1 won't "redraw" text
      lines properly when scrolling back then forward
    Originally filed against Gnome 2.4.x.  Has a patch to fix the
    issue (and which existed in time to get into the 2.8.0 release)
    which multiple people have verified as working and which has gone
    into at least one distro's patchset.  But, you know, it's vte.


Bugs new to 2.9.x that remain on the list


  libgnome
    #166722 : gnome_url_show and gnome-open need to use
      startup-notification and take a timestamp parameter
    This is resulting in busy cursors not being used, but more
    importantly in weird apps not being focused when they are
    launched.  As pointed out at http://tinyurl.com/4k5bb, apps really
    need to be launched with startup-notification in order for focus
    stealing prevention to work--especially those weird apps that do
    things behind gtk+'s back in order to only have one instance
    running.  Fixing this correctly would require an API addition to
    libgnome (to add a timestamp parameter) and would require the apps
    that make use of gnome_url_show to be modified to use the new API.
    However, we could modify those weird apps as discussed at
    http://tinyurl.com/6s692 to attempt to handle not being launched
    with startup-notification in a hackish way, and then punt this bug
    until 2.12.  It'd result in apps stealing focus sometimes when
    they shouldn't (and thus make focusing stealing prevention
    incomplete), but it'd remove the current
    apps-arent-focused-on-launch regression we have relative to 2.8.