[5067] in testers
Re: tasklist applet flaking
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Tue Jul 31 13:34:18 2001
Message-Id: <200107311730.NAA06749@egyptian-gods.MIT.EDU>
To: Mitchell E Berger <mitchb@mit.edu>
cc: testers@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 31 Jul 2001 12:52:35 EDT."
<200107311652.MAA04873@byte-me.mit.edu>
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2001 13:30:32 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
> Forgive my lameness... they're from around the end of 1999 and are
> indeed too old to be of use to us at the moment. Searching more
> intelligently, with only versions >= 1.4 turns up very few bugs,
> none mentioning a crash or failure to start. I'm at a loss for a
> next step.
I've checked CVS and there has only been one patch to the tasklist
applet since gnome-core 1.4.0.4, and it doesn't seem to do anything
besides fix some resource leaks (some pixmaps and images weren't
getting properly unreferenced or freed). So I think we're on our own.
We should try to find a way to reproduce the problem, and/or enable
core dumps on some machines or accounts ("unlimit coredumpsize" in
.cshrc.mine should do it, I think, or even just in .environment).
Also, we should make note of the platforms the problem has been
observed on (only the initial failure; if tasklist-applet is removed
from the panel config and that persists into the next login, it
doesn't help us to know that).
Another thing we can do is hack panel so that crashed applets don't
get removed from the panel config. But that sounds potentially
difficult, especially if the user makes changes like re-adding the
applet or moving another applet into the same space. Perhaps
restarting crashed applets after a delay would work better, though
that has a nasty failure mode for applets which simply never work. No
great answers here.
