Re: loosing settings

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Ken Lierman <kliermanm bigfoot com> writes:
> 
> Over the weekend i threw together a quick program.  
> [if anyone is interrested, it monitors xscreensaver, and runs programs
> when the screen blanks, unblanks, etc]
> 
> Anyway, it uses gconf and pong for it's settings. However, after some
> period of time, all my settings are lost... anyone ever see behavior
> like this before?
> 
> Basically, there is a gui which allows you to set the settings (through
> pong), and a deamon which monitors xscreensaver, then on events reads
> the gconf settings and does stuff.  Could there be a problem with 2
> programs accessing the same gconf variables? (although the gui shouldn't
> actually be accessing the data)
> 
> I can't even correlate the loss of the data to a specific event, i can
> open/close the gui, have the deamon read data, etc, but after some
> period of time the deamon fails to do what expected, and the gui shows
> the settings all at their defaults....
> 
> ???? any ideas?

First step is to be sure you are logging errors from gconfd; add a
line like this to /etc/syslog.conf and restart syslogd:

 user.* /var/log/user

Now see if gconf puts anything strange in there.

Also, be sure you are checking errors in your program and displaying
those, instead of passing NULL to ignore errors. (Exception is with
GConfClient, gconf_client_ methods will print errors if you pass
NULL.) If you get errors there, see what they are.

A first thing to check - do you have multiple gconfd processes
running? If so, that is likely the problem; one of them has the lock
on your settings, and your app is talking to the other one.

Also, see if ~/.gconf contains files that appear to contain your
settings.

Let me know what you find out, will be useful if other people report
problems.

Havoc