Re: the memory leak bug affecting gdm3 upstream GNOME bug seems to have been disappeared.
Replying in-line :-
On 25/11/2019, Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Nov 2019 at 15:17:44 +0000, shirish शिरीष wrote:
>> Few months back I came to know of #895990 specifically while trying to
>> install gdm3. The bug is still outstanding
>
> Sorry, "GNOME Shell memory use increases" is not really an actionable bug.
> It's a symptom that can appear for multiple reasons, and neither upstream
> nor Debian can fix instances of that symptom without *considerably*
> more information.
>
> (An analogy: if you report a bug that just says "Firefox crashed", then
> that is not an actionable bug, and you will not get useful results by
> reporting it. However, if you report a bug "Firefox crashes when I visit
> gnome.org, with this message ... and this backtrace ..." then that's
> specific enough to track, and is something that its maintainers might
> be able to fix.)
>
> The gjs Javascript runtime uses garbage-collection, not
> reference-counting, so it does not return unused allocated memory
> to the system until an unpredictable time has passed. That cannot be
> fixed without extensive design changes: if I understand correctly, the
> Javascript language definition means that all Javascript implementations
> must use garbage-collection, so as long as GNOME Shell is partly
> implemented in Javascript, unused allocated memory will not be returned
> to the system immediately.
>
> If you are aware of rapid memory growth when you carry out a specific
> action (perhaps repeatedly), that might be a useful bug report: please
> report it as a bug, with a title that is as specific as possible,
> and specific steps to reproduce it. For example, if memory use grows
> when you open and close the menu in the top right corner by clicking it
> repeatedly, and does not return to normal after leaving the Shell idle
> for a few minutes, then that would be an actionable bug report.
>
> If you are aware of a patch or commit that fixes a memory leak, and
> has been applied upstream but not in (some specific version in) Debian,
> that is also a useful, actionable bug report.
>
> A non-specific report like "a lot of memory gets allocated" is not
> really something that we can ever fix or close, so it is not a useful
> way to improve GNOME; and in the past, reports of that form have tended
> to attract replies that mix up multiple root causes in an unhelpful way,
> causing developers to either spend a lot of time dealing with replies
> (which is time that they would have preferred to spend fixing bugs!),
> or ignore the bug report and work on something more rewarding instead.
>
>> and from the discussion
>> appears needs to have other patches which are not in libgs which is
>> part of gnome-shell. It referenced LP bug 1672297 which in turn
>> referenced debian upstream bug 77537 on gitlab.com
>
> You seem to be confusing a lot of different things. Debian bugs are not
> the same as upstream bugs, gitlab.com is not the same as GNOME's
> instance of Gitlab, bugs in GNOME's instance of Gitlab are unlikely
> to have 5-digit bug numbers, and bugs in GNOME's old Bugzilla bug
> tracker mostly don't have 5-digit bug numbers either.
>
> There is no library called libgs. You might mean libgjs, which is part
> of gjs and is used by GNOME Shell, or libgnome-shell, which is part of
> GNOME Shell.
>
> Please try to be precise.
>
>> The upstream bug doesn't seem to be visible . Going to [1] I get a 404
>> 1. https://gitlab.gnome.org/777537
>
Dear Simon,
Thank you for responding so quickly and in such a detailed way.
That was the link that launchpad gave me. See the gnome-bugs link as
given at https://bugs.launchpad.net/gnome-shell/+bug/1672297
> Getting a 404 for that address is expected. That is not the format of a
> GNOME Gitlab bug URL.
>
> You might be looking for
> <https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=777537> which was converted
> into <https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/issues/64>.
>
> The best summaries there are
> <https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/issues/64#note_295977>
> and <https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/issues/64#note_296648>.
>
> smcv
>
In light of the above detailed explanation, why is the bug in Debian
still open. Shouldn't it be closed then? I think you covered all the
points eloquently so it should be closed and let people open when they
have specific issues.
I just had a look at the GNOME wiki page on Debian [1] but that I
guess is probably another thread/discussion in itself. For e.g. the
3.34 page doesn't seem to be tracked therein [2] . It also would be
nice for e.g. if there was any GNOME debugging wiki page but that
would be part of the documentation team itself. If there is an
existence of such a page please let me know. FWIW, I did try to trawl
through [3] but without much to show for it :(
1. https://wiki.debian.org/Gnome
2. https://people.debian.org/~fpeters/gnome/debian-gnome-3.34-status.html
3. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianPackage?action=fullsearch&context=180&value=Gnome
--
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal शिरीष अग्रवाल
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