[5397] in Release_7.7_team
Status update on native GNOME exploration
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Fri Jan 13 03:11:59 2006
Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2006 03:11:29 -0500
Message-Id: <200601130811.k0D8BTRd016392@egyptian-gods.mit.edu>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@MIT.EDU
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This week I've been working on the following task:
Explore/prototype Athena release for Linux that uses native GNOME
packages.
I've built a copy of the Athena release without any of the GNOME
packages (surprisingly easy), installed it on a laptop, and tested it.
I found I could log in as systest with a few error messages, though I
saw some hangs and lockups some of the time; I haven't tracked down
whether these were AFS-over-tunnel issues or GConf issues.
I also went and inventoried the changes we've made to the GNOME
packages for the Athena release. Cutting out changes we made to get
packages to build, changes we made for the sake of Solaris, and
bugfixes I know to also be fixed in the RHEL4 packages, we are left
with the following:
* control-center
- Don't check for and warn about X server settings changes between
invocations, since successive logins may be on different
machines
- Fix for gnome-settings-daemon hanging on startup
* esound
- Fix for race conditions when spawning at login time
- Run under dustbuster
* GConf2
- Several locking changes for shared homedirs
- Support for separate session directory for each login
- NOCALLS support
* gnome-desktop
- Make desktop launchers work when homedir is inaccessible
* gnome-mime-data
- Configure Athena apps as handlers for MIME types
* gnome-themes
- Namespace cleanup to fix gdialog bug (fixed upstream, not in RHEL 4)
* gnome-vfs2
- Make trash handling work with AFS homedirs
* libbonobo
- Run bonobo-activation-server under dustbuster
* libgnome
- Make GNOME app initialization work with inaccessible homedir
* libgnomeprint
- Set paper default size to Letter instead of A4
* metacity
- Fixes to window stacking (some fixed upstream, not in RHEL 4)
* nautilus
- Remove dialog about migration from older GNOME version
* ORBit2
- Support for separate session directory for each login
- Workaround for logout crash bug
* zenity
- Fixes for usability issues affecting Firefox lock dialog (some
fixed upstream, not in RHEL 4)
The changes to GConf2 and ORBit2 to support separate session
directories were made because we don't want GConf2 clients or bonobo
clients picking up server processes from other login sessions which
aren't using the same Kerberos tickets or AFS tokens.
The vast majority of these changes are to make GNOME work better for
shared home directories in AFS. I need to do further analysis to
figure out precisely how the lack of these changes will manifest as
user-visible bugs. (Some are obvious, like broken Nautilus trash
handling if we don't have the changes to gnome-vfs2, but the effects
of the GConf2 and ORBit2 changes are more complicated.)
I noticed that there have been relatively few updates to the GNOME
packages in the lifetime of RHEL 4. It's possible that we could adopt
a model where we ship modified versions of selected Red Hat GNOME
packages, with the resulting materials living in /usr rather than
/usr/athena, and not have a big maintenance burden from Red Hat
updates.
