Re: <<< Rebuilding Nuked "/etc/gconf" >>>

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

Just to explain in detail why the stuff you tried didn't work:

On Sun, 2004-01-04 at 07:09, jeff quade wrote:
> 1- Reinstalled gconf -1.2 from source
> -- seemed like the right place to start
> 

The settings you blew away came from apps, not from gconf. So installing
gconf doesn't do anything.

> 2- Reran gconf-sanity-check-2
> -- No output, nada Zilch

That's because gconf is working just fine; you just nuked all the data
stored in it.

> -- Did however find some clues on the console when X shut down ungracefully 
> concerning metacity's need for key-- 
> .../apps/metacity/general/num_workspaces

Precisely, specific app data is missing. The nukage you did was
equivalent to deleting /usr/share/metacity or something.

> 2- Reinstalled libgnome-2.2, all gnome-*(2.2), all nautilus-*(2.2), 
> metacity-3.4 from RPMs
> -- seemed to create the core "/etc/gconf/" directory structure
> -- but did not provide a core set of prefs to fire up X

You have to reinstall _everything_ and be sure the %post scripts run.
You probably missed something. e.g. some of the lib* or stuff not
starting with gnome-

Since the %post just do the --makefile-install-rule command I mentioned,
though, you don't need to get RPM involved.

> 3- Set "/etc/syslog.config" to report gconf errors as suggested in:
> http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/
> --This resulted in resetting the permission to "+RW" on the "/etc/gconf/" 
> directory structure
> -- Also restarting the "nfslock" service which seems to be needed by gconf

There's no problem with gconf here, just the settings stored in it are
needed by apps, so this wasn't relevant.

> 4-Hand edited a "/etc/gconf/2/path" file

What did you change about it? You can break things here by removing the
settings you need from the search path, or removing the ~/.gconf that
users need to store their settings. To restore sanity you'll need to be
sure you undo any breakage in this file.

> 5-Reinstalled nautilus-2.2 again
> -- Thought this may be a package order install thing-- no luck

Now you're just flailing at random ;-)

> Gconf looks  ALOT like the big bad ugly BLACK BOX that is the Windows 
> Registry.
> Argh.
> 
> What did I miss?

You made everything way too complicated. Ignore "gconf" as some big
scary word - there are just application default settings in text files
in /etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults. You nuked all the default settings for
the apps. The apps don't have robust fallbacks for missing settings as
they expect the settings to exist, just as they expect /usr/share and
/usr/bin and /etc/passwd to exist. It would be nice if apps had robust
fallbacks, I agree, but nothing to do with gconf that they don't.

Havoc