Re: Why does killing GS with SIGHUP crash on the 2nd time?

[Florian Müllner <fmuellner gnome org>]

On Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 11:33 PM, Marco Scannadinari
<marco scannadinari co uk> wrote:
> For some reason, using this command twice crashes the shell. It is not
> python-specific, as pkill -HUP gnome-shell and killall -HUP gnome-shell
> produce the same result, which is odd because Alt+F2 + "r" * (a lot)
> does not crash it.

gnome-session will give up trying to respawn the shell if it crashes
too often (where "crash" means "exit with a non-zero exit value"). I
don't know where the idea that SIGHUP would restart the shell came
from, it doesn't - the default behavior of SIGHUP is to terminate the
process (e.g. you could just as well use SIGTERM or even SIGKILL, see
man(7) signal). This is different from issuing the "restart" command
in the run dialog, which will actually restart the shell (instead of
killing the process and relying on gnome-session to spawn another
instance).


> Should I be issuing a different signal to gnome-shell, or do I have to
> use gnome-shell --replace from the commandline?

Any concerns that killing/reloading the desktop interface isn't what
an application should do in my opinion aside, the shell exposes an
Eval() DBus method on org.gnome.Shell, passing "global.reexec_self()"
will trigger a proper restart.