Re: Will Gnome _EVER_ be stable?

[hobbit aloss ukuu org uk]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2002 at 06:29:46PM -0500 or thereabouts, stan wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 13, 2002 at 01:11:32PM -0500, Geoffrey wrote:
> > stan wrote:
> > 
> > >Will Gnome _EVER_ become a stable environment to try to do productive work
> > >in, That is one that I don't have to spend hours rebuilding on a regular
> > >basis?
> > 
> > Two points on this issue.  I've been using Gnome for a couple of years. 
> >  I work from home and my Linux box is my primary development 
> > environment.   I've never had it trash my whole config.  I'm not saying 
> > it doesn't happen.
> > 
> > Next point, one word, backup?
> 
> Got that. However, given teh coplexity of Gnomes . files, I would not have a clue where to
> begin restoring.

I'll preface this by saying that whilst I have done amazing things
to my Gnome setup, I've never actually trashed the entire thing.

Despite this, I do keep test accounts, where I -- well. Test stuff :) 
Before doing it for real.

On the .gnome files, here's a rough guide. This account was created
on RH 5.2 (and Gnome 1.0, which was far more unstable than Gnome is
these days, despite having far less in it), and successively migrated 
through the subsequent betas and releases to RH 7.2, so not everything 
here may actually get created by default in RH 7.2. Things change :) 

In .gnome/ almost everything is an ascii text file. "file * | grep -v text"
shows you the rest. The one big exception is metadata.db which is
apparently "Berkeley DB 1.85 (Hash, version 2, native byte-order)"
for me. 

I have a lot of gnome-terminal-random-letter files for no apparent
reason: the only difference appears to be the geometry and the 
dates on them look like the last few times I restarted X. I believe
they're just session-manager stuff. My defaults and tclasses (a
gnome-terminal thing) are actually in the .gnome/Terminal file. 

All the text files have a roughly similar format: geometry, font,
editor, needs_term (true or false) and so on. 

panel.d/ or panel.d/default contains your launchers and stuff from
the panel. 

If I want to start over completely from scratch, I'd move or remove
the entire directory. I'd also go on a blitz through /tmp removing
all the /tmp/.ICE-unix/ /tmp/.esd/ and ./.swafish-username/ stuff
I had permissions to remove. These are mostly sockets. I don't think 
it hurts to remove these :) I'd do it when not in GNOME though, just 
in case.

I have lost the original mail. Was it GNOME as a whole hanging?
Specific apps crashing? I am curious whether the same thing happens
in X or KDE (in which case I'd blame X).

You can get X error messages from /var/log/XFree86.[display].log
(and hmm, I seem to have a lot about GetModeLine in there: should
I worry?) 

When you mention you're spending hours rebuilding Gnome, is this
building as in compiling, or as in setting up default settings, 
or what? 

Telsa