Re: [gnome-flashback] Debug-ability; getting gnome-panel 3.8 out

[Philipp Kaluza <floss ghostroute eu>]

Hi Lanoxx,

Am 24.09.2013 17:37, schrieb Lanoxx:
> On 24/09/13 17:21, Philipp Kaluza wrote:
> > Hi Lanoxx,
> >
> > Didn't you get my email on 2013-08-01 ? I had tried to explain why
> > jhbuild does what it does.
> >
> > Also Dmitry had suggested on 2013-08-15 to just build a git checkout
> > standalone. Have you tried this ?
> Yes, I got those mails. It did help me a bit but then I didnt have any
> time anymore. I will try the approach with building directly from git
> and report how that went. Hopefully I find time for this on the weekend.
Cool, let us know how it goes.

> How about I also build gnome-session from git? Would that be a good
> idea or will it make everything worse?
Depends; it might be a slippery slope. Officially™ we can work together
with gnome-session 3.8 and gnome-settings-daemon 3.8. But if you need to
build lots of dependencies yourself, you might get to the point where
jhbuild will be easier again. ^^

Tip (I think Dimitry said it first): "jhbuild buildone dependency1
dependency2 package" could turn out to be your friend - solving the
dependencies yourself and avoiding most of the stack.

> The way how I imagine the build process to work, would be to build
> gnome-panel, gnome-session and gnome-applets my self and use the
> system libraries for everything else.
Leave gnome-applets out of it for now - it has not been updated yet. The
really important applets (IMHO) are in the gnome-panel package anyhow.

Actually if you want to leave out gnome-session also, and try to start
your system-built gnome-session 3.4-or-similar first, you will probably
encounter interesting bugs, and could send us a nice log.
(Touch ~/.xsession-errors-flashback first.)
While mix-and-matching different gnome-panel and gnome-session versions
is not something we can formally support, we'll see if your trials turn
up anything interesting ^^ - that could help us increase interoperability.

> One other question, can you recommend a good document that explains
> the relation ship between session management (e.g. gnome-session), the
> window manager (e.g. metacity) and the shell (e.g gnome-panel). So far
> I only understand what the window manager does, but gnome-session is
> mostly magic for me.

Don't know of any good documents.

Let me give it a quick try:

GDM interprets
gnome-flashback xsession file¹ (called gnome-fallback.desktop for legacy
reasons) which starts
gnome-session-flashback shell script¹ which calls
gnome-session --session=gnome-flashback
which (loads gnome-flashback.session¹ and then) starts
metacity, gnome-panel¹ and gnome-settings-daemon
the latter of which loads lots of plugins.

¹ all these parts are shipped in the gnome-panel package

All clear ?

Cheers
  Philipp

-- 
Philipp Kaluza
Ghostroute IT Consulting