Hi list [ Writing this to a) vent frustration and (spoiler alert ;-) ) b) warn about a strange change in x11-wm/awesome (from upstream or Gentoo, I don't know). ]
Well, I just finished debugging an issue that cropped up around mid-march that
I didn't have time to track down properly, mostly because the logs just didn't
reveal anything other than that lightdm-gtk-greeter stopped (well, syslog
correctly says "segfault", but the lightdm log says "quit" (why "quit"?!),
fantastic).
Anyway, the problem was that after some upgrade lightdm-gtk-greeter would
SEGFAULT when starting, so I couldn't log in using lightdm. I could still use
startx though, so it wasn't of immediate importance.
First I thought:
"Well, it can't be lightdm or lightdm-gtk-greeter, because I upgraded
those before the last kernel update, so they definitely worked fine before,
and the upgrade to awesome can't influence lightdm-gtk-greeter, because that's
started afterwards."
So I went through the packages I upgraded and tried selectively downgrading the
recent upgrades that were also dependencies of lightdm or lightdm-gtk-greeter
(e.g., gettext), but no luck. Google also didn't help, the most interesting
results were things like when the user of the last saved session is deleted
from the system, then lightdm-gtk-greeter would SEGFAULT (unless you pressed
the arrow keys to go down the user list). Fun stuff like that. ( I tried that,
BTW, and it didn't work.)
Several weeks pass, then today I decided to rebuild various things in the hope
that it was a hidden ABI issue or something, but really I was just unthinkingly
flailing around hoping to catch something.
Well, after that I finally tracked it down. I finally tried downgrading to
lightdm-gtk-greeter-1.1.6 (again, it was running fine before so I didn't expect
it to be the problem) and noticed that the "awesome" session was missing from
the dropdown list. So I think "Well, let's find the file responsible for
that.", and the problem was... *drumroll* the awesome upgrade, after all. WTF!?
Well, said upgrade apparently brought a change to the xsession desktop file
located at /usr/share/xsessions/awesome.desktop, namely:
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=awesome
Comment=Highly configurable framework window manager
NoDisplay=true
^^^^ this should be false!!!!!
TryExec=awesome
Exec=awesome
Type=Application
So because of that, lightdm-gtk-greeter ignored the awesome.desktop xsession
file, resulting in it trying to load the last session which referenced the now
invalid "awesome" session. Then, instead of displaying the next available item,
lightdm-gtk-greeter decided to SEGFAULT instead. Hooray! SEGFAULTs for
EVERYONE! (Of course, why lightdm-gtk-greeter-1.1.6 worked is beyond me, a
regression in 1.3.1 maybe?)
Ahem.
Anyway, changing that line to "NoDisplay=false" fixed things for me and I was
able to upgrade back to lightdm-gtk-greeter-1.3.1-r1.
And instead of going to bed I'm venting in this email. I'll probably sleep
better for it, though (I hope).
But I can't help noticing that of course for *me* the udev-200 update goes just
fine and dandy, the new names I chose (wan0 and lan0) make more sense anyway,
but then a *window manager* upgrade manages to fsck things up in a hard to
track down way!? Just my luck.
So now I get to file a bug and ask why the hell that change was made and by
whom (oh, and I couldn't find related bugs for either lightdm or awesome on
b.g.o). Maybe somebody here knows. But first I'm going to bed (much too late,
BTW).
Weary of travelling rough terrain and in need of rest,
--
Marc Joliet
--
"People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we
don't" - Bjarne Stroustrup
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