Re: Will Gnome _EVER_ be stable?

["Brandon S. Allbery " KF8NH <allbery ece cmu edu>]

On Thu, 2002-03-21 at 19:28, Henry Katz wrote:
> > Login in using gdm. Log right back out (within say 30 seconds).
> > The WILL trash your panels.
> >
> > Hope that helps.
> 
> Bollocks!!

Actually, no.  I tend to get multiple panels during GNOME startup;
recently I determined that it's a timing issue:  apparently one or more
applets times out trying to connect to the panel if the system is too
busy, and starts a new one --- usually leading to many of your applets
dumping core.  At some point I may go digging through the applet libs
looking for a CORBA communications timeout to set/increase.

In the original poster's case, logging out before the panel is
initialized might well result in it dying while saving its settings.

> When I logged in again, the only thing that was amiss was
> that two terminals
> had shrunk in size to something < 80 x 24.

Sawfish vs. gnome-terminal.  From other odd symptoms (notably, my 262x7
console messages terminal sometimes opening really HUGE), I think some
gnome-terminal windows get their sizes saved in pixels and restored in
characters, or vice versa.  On a slower system I can even see the
windows open at the correct size, then when sawfish starts up it resizes
them to the weird size (sometimes with some flickering between the two);
so, once again, I suspect it's a timing issue of some kind between when
gnome-terminal sets the window hints to size by character cells and when
sawfish records the window's size.

I'd be suspicious of the memory size difference here:  GNOME is rather
memory-hungry, and certainly on my laptop the difference in startup
times between 128M, 384M, and 512M is dramatic.  The extra 192MB might
conceivably make gnome-session save the (incomplete) session and shut
down faster than the panel initializes....

So, probably some work needs to be put into synchronization/timing
issues during session startup/shutdown.

-- 
brandon s. allbery   [linux][solaris][japh][freebsd]
allbery kf8nh apk net
system administrator [openafs][heimdal][too many hats]
allbery ece cmu edu
electrical and computer engineering                                 
KF8NH
carnegie mellon university    ["better check the oblivious first"
-ke6sls]