HI all,

there is a very bad development in the gnome-shell that reminds me off the
dreaded BSOD under Windows, namely the "Ohh, something went wrong. Please
log out and in again" or however the message is.

This is *WRONG*. I am fine if my window manager dies, but I do NOT accept
that it tears down my ssh session where I am writing long emails.

After pressing the log out button I see the *still*working* ssh session
for a fraction until every process is killed.

gnome-shell should terminate in this case and just leave the other programs
running. In this case I can terminate the shells and sshs in a proper
way. Being forced to log out is definitely *not* acceptable.

Thanks for fixing this in a proper way

Norbert

forwarded 656762 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=658671
thanks

+1

The error message isn't actually from gnome-shell but from
gnome-session. Funnily it doesn't even seem to be triggered by a problem
with the shell, but caused by gnome-settings-daemon crashing, the shell
and all apps are happily running in the background. (Or at least on my
system this is the case).

Everything I care about is running under gnome-session so forcing a
logout without a chance to save stuff is pretty bad, for me it's almost
as bad as just restarting X or forcing a reboot.

Until this is fixed upstream I wouldn't mind having the fail whale
function ripped out. If g-s-d crashes I can restart it manually, or live
with badly themed apps until I decide to log out and in again.

reassign 656564 gnome-settings-daemon
severity serious
reassign 656762 gnome-session
severity serious
thanks

Dear all,

it seems there is a very bad interaction between gnome-session,
gnome-settings-daemon, and maybe glibc2.0.

First, gnome-settings-daemon is terminating on a regular basis:
gnome-settings-[3520]: segfault at 7f453c075140 ip 00007f464659278e sp 00007fffeb5f1120 error 4 in libglib-2.0.so.0.3000.2[7f464650b000+f6000]
Although I have recompiled glib2.0 without the last patches that
might have triggered this, it still does happen on a regular basis.

Triggered by this, gnome-session shows the "Oh something went wrong"
screen making it impossible to save work, although the session is
absolutely fine working, just the settings are not applied. I see
all the work I was doing in the overview of gnome-shell, but I cannot
save it.

These two things together create a situation that is a guarantee for
data loss.

Please work together to find a fix for this, I am open for testing,
patches, whatsoever.

Best wishes

Norbert
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Norbert Preining            preining@{jaist.ac.jp, logic.at, debian.org}
JAIST, Japan                                 TeX Live & Debian Developer
DSA: 0x09C5B094   fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76  A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
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MUGEARY (n. medical)
The substance from which the unpleasant little yellow globules in the
corners of a sleepy person's eyes are made.
			--- Douglas Adams, The Meaning of Liff

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=658671#c9

Btw, I can't really reproduce the issue, that a segfaulting
gnome-settings-daemon causes the fail-whale to show up, that is the
session is closed.

I'm wondering if there is something else going on and this is is due to
a special configuration/setup on your side.

Can you reproduce the fail-whale on g-s-d segfaults with a fresh user
account?

Can you also please either try to get a backtrace or a core dump.
Instructions have been given in the previous emails.

Hi Michael,

It does not happen *always*. I mean, the g-s-d *often crashes, but
only sometimes it is respawned too fast so that the fail whale shows
up.

i have *no* idea how the difference comes into being, though.

I will try.

Best wishes

Norbert
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Norbert Preining            preining@{jaist.ac.jp, logic.at, debian.org}
JAIST, Japan                                 TeX Live & Debian Developer
DSA: 0x09C5B094   fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76  A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
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QUERRIN (n.)
A person that no one has ever heard of who unaccountably manages to
make a living writing prefaces.
			--- Douglas Adams, The Meaning of Liff

and still see the effect:
[  400.311116] gnome-settings-[3633]: segfault at ffffffff0238fd80 ip 00007ff2b804b78e sp 00007ffff6d448e0 error 4 in libglib-2.0.so.0.3000.2[7ff2b7fc4000+f6000]


Unfortunately no gdb was attached (how doe sone do that?).

I will restart and hope it happens soon again.

So it seems to be a different thing! I checked the bug logs and
found that *always* there are some warnings about packagekit, aand
at the same time packagekit was updated from 0.7.1-2 -> 0.7.2-1
which brought eg
	- glib: Convert libpackagekit-glib2 from dbus-glib to GDBus

No idea if that could be the reason?!

Best wishes

Norbert
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Norbert Preining            preining@{jaist.ac.jp, logic.at, debian.org}
JAIST, Japan                                 TeX Live & Debian Developer
DSA: 0x09C5B094   fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76  A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
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ABINGER (n.)
One who washes up everything except the frying pan, the cheese grater
and the saucepan which the chocolate sauce has been made in.
			--- Douglas Adams, The Meaning of Liff

I've been seeing more frequent crashes of g-s-d too in the last couple
of days. The core dump I got also points into the direction of
PackageKit. Could you disable the updates plugin for now (re-login, to
be sure the change is picked up).

For that, run (as the regular user)
# gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.updates active false

Ahh, at least it is getting reproducible ;-)

Best wishes

Norbert
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Norbert Preining            preining@{jaist.ac.jp, logic.at, debian.org}
JAIST, Japan                                 TeX Live & Debian Developer
DSA: 0x09C5B094   fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76  A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
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CORFE (n.)
An object which is almost totally indistinguishable from a newspaper,
the one crucial difference being tat it belongs to somebody else and
is unaccountably much more interesting that your own - which may
otherwise appear to be in all respects identical. Though it is a rule
of life that a train or other public place may contain any number of
corfes but only one newspaper, it is quite possible to transform your
own perfectly ordinary newspaper into a corfe by the simple expedient
of letting somebody else read it.
			--- Douglas Adams, The Meaning of Liff

Hi,

I just want to say that I'm too experiencing the issue of massive g-s-d
crashes with the "fail-whale" showing up every now and then.
For that crash window: it seems to be just a stupid application, so a ALT-F4
closes it and you get your desktop back.

As a workaround I downgraded libglib2.0 to version 2.30.2-4 and it seems
to run pretty stable, though no thorough testing done yet!

I started having this problem recently and to lend some credibility to
the PackageKit theory, it started about the same time I installed
PackageKit.  I set the key as noted above and have not experienced the
issue as of yet.  I set the key last evening though, so probably not
long enough time has passed to make any drastic proclamations yet.

Setting that key seems to have resolved the issue for me.

One way to workaround this bug is to minimize (default shortcup alt+f9,
or alt+space then click minimize) the "somthing went wrong" window.
Works well here.

One way to workaround this bug is to minimize (default shortcup alt+f9,
or alt+space then click minimize) the "somthing went wrong" window.
Works well here.

Hi!


When I was using gnome3 some months ago this bug annoyed me more than a
couple of times, I was able to work-around it by making the annoying
whale window to be a normal desktop window, so when it pop-ups you can
move it to a corner with the mouse and save your data before logging out.

To make the whale be a movable desktop window you just have to set the
debug property.

Here is the patch that I applied to achieve this:


$ cat gnome-session-3.2.1/debian/patches/make-whale-be-debug.patch
--- a/gnome-session/gsm-manager.c
+++ b/gnome-session/gsm-manager.c
@@ -286,7 +286,7 @@
                 allow_logout = !_log_out_is_locked_down (manager);
         }

-        gsm_fail_whale_dialog_we_failed (FALSE,
+        gsm_fail_whale_dialog_we_failed (TRUE,
                                          allow_logout,
                                          want_extensions_ui);
 }

A related upstream discussion is at
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=677875

I have to agree that the fail-whale is a rather annoying "feature".

Michael

Indeed, exactely my words.
At some point in time I was told that "programs should save the
data when they are torn down" ... well, hopefully G-devs
start to think normally again, in he near future.

Best wishes

Norbert

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Norbert Preining                preining@{jaist.ac.jp, logic.at, debian.org}
JAIST, Japan                                   TeX Live and Debian Developer
gpg DSA: 0x09C5B094   fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76  A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
FAIRYMOUNT (vb.n.)
Polite word for buggery.
			--- Douglas Adams, The Meaning of Liff

hi!

Can somebody of the gnome-team comment on the status of this, or at least
know what do you plan to do about it? :)

bugs upstream status are UNCONFIRM

The debug mode for the window could be a workaround in debian, although i
dont know the implications of setting the window to debug mode. Maybe
somebody from gnome-team can comment on this too

Thanks!
PS: we are getting close to be able to release! Thanks for the good work!