Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 104735
gconfd has some very bad error handling.
Last modified: 2014-03-16 22:38:52 EDT
For a period of a couple weeks on one of my crash boxes, every time I logged in, I had no configuration, a pile of error dialogs, and *no* fonts (i.e., all the dialogs were blank.) The cause of this was: Sep 19 18:18:02 apone gconfd (notting-1894): Failed to get lock for daemon, exiting: Failed to lock '/home/devel/notting/tmp/gconfd-notting/lock/ior': probably another process has the lock, or your operating system has NFS file locking misconfigured (Resource temporarily unavailable) i.e., gconfd had an error when starting, and then *exited*, with no user-visible error message. Shouldn't there be some sort of error message printed to the user so they can have some help debugging the problem?
gconfd doesn't have an X connection, how can it display a dialog? it logs the exact error to syslog, you just have to look... ;-) All the apps _did_ display a dialog... gconf-sanity-check-2 should have been run at login and should have detected this error, also. If that didn't happen we could check why. Assuming the problem was a stale lock file.
Yes, but the dialogs are completely useless when you have no fonts. Does gconf-sanity-check-2 print any messages? Or log anything?
sanity-check-2 opens a dialog if there's a DISPLAY otherwise prints to stderr. If there's no fonts that's not something gconf can fix, maybe gnome-settings-daemon needs to verify that the setting is present, and if not have an emergency fallback.
sanity-check-2 did not open a dialog, apparently.
It's back in this state again if you want to play.
I think the fixes here are: - make gnome-settings-daemon etc. have sanity checks on font size - don't use a TMPDIR on NFS ;-) you are breaking my workaround-nfs-locking-sucks hack - more pervasive gconf fixes, http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/plans.html So closing this particular bug.