[SOLVED/Bug?] Re: Mystery of the vanishing session
On Sun, Dec 15, 2002 at 01:45:29PM -0800, Ross Boylan wrote:
> DISAPPEARING SESSIONS
>
> I am running KDE 2 (2.2.2) on Debian/testing, and I have also built
> KDE 3.1 (c. rc5) from CVS and installed it in local directories.
>
> So my kdm is from the standard distribution. I have added a kde3
> session type to it to invoke the kde 3 installation. The problem I
> have is that session type keeps disappearing--not every time I log out
> or shutdown, but intermittently.
>
> I originally created the session type by editing some control files;
> the first time it disappeared I used kcontrol's login manager settings
> to add the session. Either way, it sometimes disappears. (The kde3
> invoking script I wrote for the session to use doesn't disappear, but
> the kde3 in the session drop downs does disappear).
>
> Since I thought the setup might be somewhat Debian specific, I thought
> I'd ask here.
>
> One theory that has occurred to me is that it may disappear whenever
> my last logout is from a kde3 session. I typically run kde2 in one
> virtual terminal and kde3 in another. Does anyone see any way the
> kde3 logout could overwrite the settings kde2 uses? Note that my kde3
> build is standard, not via debian/rules.
>
> Another possibility is that something about apt-get dist-upgrade
> resets the session list, since I just did one of those before the
> session disappeared.
>
This happened again, and I got curious enough to track it down. The
theory of the last paragraph is on the right track. When an upgrade
installs an item that invokes update-menus (anything that affects the
menus, e.g., knode on my last update) this in turn invokes
/etc/menu-methods/kdm. This in turn invokes kdm-update-menu in its
postrun.
kdm-update-menu rebuilds the session menu unless generate-sessiontypes
is not in /etc/kde2/kdm/kdm.options. When it does, it pulls together
alternatives registered for x-window-manager and x-session-manager.
So I think the solution is to either disable generate session types or
tell the system that my new session type (kde3) is an alternative with
update-alternatives.
Question: should I file a bug because user-created sessions added from
kcontrol get zapped in this way? Probably kcontrol should do the
necessary update-alternative.
This is for a testing kde2 system; I don't know if it's changed with
the kde3 packages. I've been installing the regular, non-Debian,
kde3.1.
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