Re: meld stopped working when run as root

[Kai Willadsen <kai willadsen gmail com>]

2009/10/8 Grant Edwards <grant b edwards gmail com>:
> On 2009-08-14, Grant Edwards <grant b edwards gmail com> wrote:
>> I used to use meld regularly on different versions of system
>> config files (that are only readble by root).  However,
>> sometime recently meld stopped working when run as root:
>
> So is using meld as root simply out of the question now?

Sorry - meant to respond to this. There haven't been any changes to
Meld that should change running as root. See below.

2009/8/15 Grant Edwards <grant b edwards gmail com>:
>   Traceback (most recent call last):
>     File "/usr/bin/meld", line 90, in <module>
>       meldapp.main()
>     File "//usr/lib/meld/meldapp.py", line 982, in main
>       app = MeldApp()
>     File "//usr/lib/meld/meldapp.py", line 562, in __init__
>       self.prefs = MeldPreferences()
>     File "//usr/lib/meld/meldapp.py", line 435, in __init__
>       super(MeldPreferences, self).__init__("/apps/meld", self.defaults)
>     File "//usr/lib/meld/prefs.py", line 92, in __init__
>       self._gconf.add_dir(rootkey, gconf.CLIENT_PRELOAD_NONE)
>   glib.GError: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Failed to get connection to session: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.)

I'm guessing you're seeing
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=555745 (in gconf) though
why it only just started happening I have no idea. Anyway, the 'su -'
workaround seems to work.

> Is there any way to get meld working again for root? What's a
> "configuration server"? I already build it withough gnome
> support (Gentoo gnome USE flag is unset).

Unless Gentoo has patched one in, Meld doesn't support a 'no Gnome'
mode. Having said that, if Meld fails to find gconf, it will use
python's configparser configuration backend instead. If you really
don't want gconf at all, you can change the import logic at the end of
prefs.py.

cheers,
Kai