Bug 960978

Perhaps the real issue here is that there was no opportunity to diagnose or fix the problem when gnome-shell determined that the designated theme was unavailable.  A dialog allowing selection of another theme, automatic fallback to the default theme, or at very least, a diagnostic message in a pop-up would seem to be in order.

This was raised on the fedora users list.

It would be nice not to fail on a bad theme, but just fail back to the default. Not sure if possible. Aside from that, maybe show the GDM session log optionally (hidden by some expander) in the fail screen.

(In reply to comment #2)
> It would be nice not to fail on a bad theme, but just fail back to the
> default.

Is this about the user-themes extension? Officially we only support themes for toolkit and window decorations, which both do exactly that (fall back to defaults) ...

(In reply to comment #3)
> (In reply to comment #2)
> > It would be nice not to fail on a bad theme, but just fail back to the
> > default.
> 
> Is this about the user-themes extension? Officially we only support themes
> for toolkit and window decorations, which both do exactly that (fall back to
> defaults) ...

Well, I did nothing with user themes.  In fact, I hadn't touched themes at all--was originally set to use the default.  I did have gnome-tweak-tool installed, but only to manage mouse settings and plugins.  I had not used it to do anything with themes.

I have noticed on occasion that some settings seem to change spontaneously if I restart.  For example, highlighting the pointer when the control key is pressed seems not to be always preserved.

(In reply to comment #4)
> (In reply to comment #3)
> > Is this about the user-themes extension? Officially we only support themes
> > for toolkit and window decorations, which both do exactly that (fall back to
> > defaults) ...
> 
> Well, I did nothing with user themes.

This doesn't quite answer the question of what theme is causing trouble :-)

Relevant options I can think of: gnome-shell theme (no official themeing support, but available via the user-themes extension), window decoration theme (e.g. "gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences theme") and toolkit theme (e.g. "gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme").

Note that I can't reproduce the issue setting either of those to bogus values, so I'm really curious about what's going on.


> In fact, I hadn't touched themes at all--was originally set to use the 
> default.  I did have gnome-tweak-tool installed, but only to manage mouse 
> settings and plugins.  I had not used it
> to do anything with themes.

That is ... odd.


> I have noticed on occasion that some settings seem to change spontaneously
> if I restart.  For example, highlighting the pointer when the control key is
> pressed seems not to be always preserved.

This sounds like a dconf problem. If the dconf settings backend fails, there'll be a fallback to the memory backend, which just uses ram (e.g. settings values won't be shared between processes and changes are lost on restart). But even in that case there should never be a change to a non-default value ...

(I'm assuming that this is about inofficial shell theming, as the bug was filed against the shell component)

(In reply to comment #2)
> It would be nice not to fail on a bad theme, but just fail back to the
> default. Not sure if possible.

This depends on the definition of "bad theme". If the theme is not installed (e.g. completely missing, as claimed in this bug) or does not contain the expected stylesheet, the default theme will be used. I'll propose a patch upstream to also behave more sanely when the theme's style is corrupt (for instance invalid CSS). I can't think of anything we can do for themes that are technically valid but break the interface anyway (which can easily happen on updates, as there's no clear separation between "code" and "style" in the shell)

(In reply to comment #6)
> I'll propose a patch upstream to also behave more sanely when the 
> theme's style is corrupt (for instance invalid CSS).

Done, see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=700097.

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