gnome (gconf) saga - please read

["Timothy H. Keitt" <tklistaddr keittlab bio sunysb edu>]

My machine crashed last night. Not sure why; probably buggy nvidia 
drivers (screen saver was frozen in mid-glx-alpha-blended-glory). After 
trying to login remotely, etc. I rebooted. The problem is that I was in 
the midst of a gnome session with evolution and galeon running. After 
logging back in, I could not run galeon. It said that gconf was 
misconfigured or that I was running two instances of gconf. Neither was 
true. (Files in /etc were untouched from latest debian package in 
testing and had reasonable entries.) After some trial and error, I moved 
 ~/.gconfd to anther name. Now galeon came up, but I had lost all 
setting, bookmarks, everything. I found they were in 
~/.galeon/old.galeon, so I moved that to ~/.galeon. Now it works sort of 
(bookmarks, cookies, etc. were restored). Now galeon immediately forgets 
new configuration settings (but for some reason, it still finds my proxy 
server, perhaps from the http_proxy environment variable?). There's a 
FAQ on the galeon site that says this is a gconf problem that the galeon 
developers cannot explain (the given solution of killing gconfd-1 does 
not, in this case, work). Evolution seemed to weather the crash better, 
but now cannot access url's on the 'summary' page. I can't at the moment 
remember where that's configured. Fortunately, other settings (panels, 
etc.) survived, but I've lost them after past X session crashes.

Now I've used gnome from the 1.0 days, and this has happened to me quite 
a few times and I imagine to others as well. After having to kill an X 
session, I've sometimes found it was better to rebuild my gnome 
environment from scratch than to try and fix corrupted files. (Are there 
_any_ tools for restoring sanity to stored gnome config info?) Sometimes 
its panel settings, sometimes applications. I think this points to a 
very deep flaw in how gnome maintains persisitent configuration and 
session information. Yes, my account is NFS mounted. I'm sure some will 
try to blame it on kernel/nfs locking or some thing else. But the fact 
remains, that in my experience, gnome simply does not reliably maintain 
persistent data. My guess is that the problem is that gconf does not 
support ACID transactions and that is causing file corruption. Sorry if 
this has been discussed to death previously; I haven't monitored this 
list for a long time. I may be barking up the wrong tree, or just 
unlucky, but please before the indignant replies pile in, try killing 
your X server in the middle of a gnome session a few times and see if 
your setup survives. (Maybe every developer on this list could do that 
once a day for the next month and report back :-) Otherwise, gnome has 
been increasingly a joy to use. I hope it gets a robust configuration 
engine someday.

Cheers,
Tim

--
Timothy H. Keitt
Department of Ecology and Evolution
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, New York 11794 USA
Phone: 631-632-1101, FAX: 631-632-7626
http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/ee/keitt/