Bug 155756

This still happens with current development updates and FC4 final is close.
Increasing severity.

This will be hard to fix without being able to reproduce it.  Do you have any
idea what triggers it to happen?

Also, how frequently does it happen for you?

I thought it's because of applications having icons in notification area (like
gaim with system tray plugin), which hide/show their windows by clicking on the
icon, but I can't reproduce :(

I have several programs in saved session (evolution, epiphany, gedit,
gnome-terminal) on different desktops.
Everything works after startup.
Then I started gaim with system-tray plugin (in notification applet), all is ok.
Started ed2k-gui, all ok (this has an icon in notification area too). This isn't
in fedora core and uses GTK.
Started valknut, all ok (this has an icon in notification area too). This isn't
in fedora core and uses QT.

From here on I used these and switch between desktops and windows when bug
occured (the 'light' version of bug). There are two buggy behaviors:
1. When switching windows by clicking in the Window list applet, the new window
with focus doesn't appear until the mouse pointer leaves the window list applet
area (or the panel? I'll try this next time)
2. Besides 1, sometimes all windows and panel dissapear. I have only one panel.
Window icons are still shown on ALT+tab, but they don't appear on desktop. 

Logout and login again fixes this.

Next time it happens I'll try to reproduce what I did before bug. Do you have
any suggestions what to do after the bug occured and might help with debugging?

Frequency: I have 8-10 hour sessions. By the end of the day, bug is usually
triggered (>75% of time).

About 1, new window will appear when mouse pointer will leave the panel, not
only the window list applet.

One thing that might help understand what  is going on is to see the output of
xwininfo -root -tree and maybe the output of xprop on the desktop background 
window.

You could also consider running metacity from a terminal with debug output
to see if it seems to get confused at some point.

Created attachment 114357 [details]
xwininfo.txt

Created attachment 114358 [details]
xprop-desktop

Created attachment 114359 [details]
xprop-panel

Created attachment 114360 [details]
xprop-valknut

xprop for "valknut" application, this seems buggy. Now on some workspaces it
shows both the icon in Notification applet, but also a tab in Window list
applet (nothing appears when clicking it), and on other workspaces it doesn't
show none of them.

How should I run metacity with debugging output?
metacity --help
metacity [--sm-disable] [--sm-client-id=ID] [--sm-save-file=FILENAME]
[--display=DISPLAY] [--replace] [--version]

Note that running "killall metacity" will restart it with correct behaviour
(including valknut which is back to normal).

I should modify ~/.gnome2/session RestartCommand for metacity to include
debugging in a file? What's that command?

Thanks

in a terminal you can run

metacity --replace >& metacity.log &
metacity-message toggle-verbose
disown

to create a file called metacity.log with debug spew.  It will fill up very
quickly though.

Hello Ray,

Sorry for the lack of feedback. I'm replicating this now on FC4 updated.
I've found the cause to be an QT application called "valknut". However, even if
it has bad code, it shouldn't affect metacity so bad?

Attached is the log you required. I turned on logging before starting valknut,
and then the bug appeared (the light version of it).

Created attachment 118358 [details]
metacity.log

This looks like upstream #311868; could you try the attached patch in that bug
and tell me the terminal output that you get?

I cannot recompile metacity. I can test a rpm for fc5 development (still happens
there, the bug is triggered by starting valknut QT application at ~50% of the
cases). killall metacity will bring the good behaviour back.

Do you still see this problem?

I can't reproduce this problem with valknut 3.7.0, so closing this bug. Feel
free to reopen if the problem still happens.