Re: Sarge troubles...
On Thu, 2004-02-12 at 08:11, Adam C Powell IV wrote:
> Yup, had write permissions everywhere, this didn't help.
>
> Hmm, I had .gconf and .gconfd as symlinks, could that have mattered?
>
> D'oh! That's it. I had rsynced the dir where the .gconf and .gconfd
> symlinks point from a place where I had GNOME 1.4 installed. So the 1.4
> stuff overwrote the 2.4 stuff. That could have done untold damage, such
> that this "no save on logout" behavior is very understandable.
>
> Okay, that problem is resolved. Sorry to bug you all with it!
I've just done a second upgrade on a different machine, and confirmed
that this was *not* the problem, that the problem manifested before I
did that rsync (as I had suspected, but the fact of the rsync seemed the
most likely reason for the problem).
The upgrade itself appeared to go just fine (except that no window
manager started, the previous one had been enlightenment, and both
enlightenment and metacity were installed), the new 2.4 desktop looked
quite a bit like the old 1.4 did, but with some of those "foot" icons
where there were missing apps, no problem.
Then the user logged out and back in, and everything had snapped back to
defaults. I checked .xsession-errors, which said that the Debian
upgrade had failed (as I recall, there was some file present indicating
this), so it was erasing all of the gconf information. This despite no
indication whatsoever of failure during the upgrade process.
Further, any changes to the gconf database were lost on logout/login
because once again .xsession-errors indicated the presence of this
failure file.
There are thus two problems with the upgrade script:
* It thinks it failed when it didn't, or at least, didn't tell the
user;
* After emptying everything out and starting with a blank gconf
database, it doesn't remove the file indicating failure.
I'll try to look further into these issues as I have time.
Oh, one other thing: as mentioned before, once I had blown away
.gnome2(-private) and .gconf(d), I could not get the "Don't draw the
background" gconf option to persist between logins. However, a desktop
upgraded by the Debian script does bring forward that option
successfully, which then persists across logins. So the Debian upgrade
script is doing something *right* regarding this option, which the gconf
editor by itself does not do... Perhaps "save state on logout" is
saving the existing state with the Nautilus-drawn background,
overwriting the key edit? In which case, editing the gconf key is thus
meaningless (perhaps unless one edits it by hand after logging out, or
disables saving the state on logout), and the key is not exposed in any
capplet.
-Adam P.
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