Bug 1667375

So, I guess you have both KDE and Xfce installed? xfconf is the xfce config store. 

Can you attach 'journalctl -b -l' after this?

also, can you try 'strace -f emacs' instead of just emacs and see where it stalls?

I can't off hand think of why this could happpen.

Created attachment 1525285 [details]
output of journalctl -b -l

Removed entries from well before test was run

Created attachment 1525287 [details]
output from strace -f emacs

To generate the strace I re-installed xfconf, created an at job to killall emacs after 2 minutes then ran strace -f emacs. I had installed xfce for testing, but I am not using it, so removing xfconf is possible.

If I ssh to F30 from a plasma session on F28 or F30 I see the same desktop hang when running emacs. It can also be worked around by removing the xfconf package, but that breaks xfce sessions which we use for X2go connections.

On the hung desktop I still have a mouse pointer that I can move around but sometimes it disappears when I move it over the currently 'active' konsole window.

Emacs is the only application that I have seen which triggers this behaviour.

Happy to help debugging this.

This seems to be caused by the new gsettings backend somehow.

If I:
mv /usr/lib64/gio/modules/libxfconfgsettingsbackend.so /usr/lib64/gio/modules/libxfconfgsettingsbackend.so.off
the problem goes away and I can run emacs over ssh. xfce still seems to work as a desktop environment.

According to this:
https://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce-announce/2018-October/000644.html
one should be able to disable the gsettings backend with the environment variable GSETTINGS_BACKEND but its not set in my shell and I haven't been able to find where its set for the xfconfd.

While investigating this I found that simply moving the libxfconfgsettingsbackend.so to .off and back again to the proper file name seems to be enough to get a working emacs over ssh. That makes no sense to me at all.

Yeah, I am really not sure what to make of this either. 

Perhaps you would be willing to file this upstream at bugzilla.xfce.org?

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