Jessies hassles. libc6, software-properites-gtk, sessions.

Greetings, everybody.

I wonder who else sees this at the moment on systems running Jessie. I know that running the testing version will require bug fixing sometimes, I don't mind that. I just need some help to understand what's wrong. I am running XCFE4, some of the problems I see may be specific to that, but not all.

I needed some updated libraries from Jessie, so I enabled that repository and tried to get just a few libraries. However, the dependency list was pretty large. When synaptic tried to update libc6, it paused with the warning that said xscreensaver or xlockmore is running, if you don't stop that, then users won't be able to log in. It pauses while you kill that, so I killed xscreensaver, the install proceeded, seemed fine. But, guess what? The user I was logged in under when the install occurred still can't complete the login. The X session tries to start, but then closes immediately. It crashes back to the login screen. Other users can log in, which is nice, because I can go in and see the config files for the troubled user.

If I had the problem that the libc6 installer warning was warning me about, how would I know and how would I fix it?

I've found some stupid hacks that don't solve the problem, but work around it. Log in as somebody else, eliminate the $HOME/.cache folder in the troubled user account, then the trouble user can log in, however, after logging out, some bad crap is written in .cache again, and the user can no longer log in. Something's clearly wrong, I have no idea.

Here's another tidbit, maybe I'm seeing something more generally wrong with gtk or libc. I run synaptic, but when I try to view the repositories, synaptic refuses, and says

"The repository information has changed. You have to click on the "Reload" button for your changes to take effect"

That happens over and over, after reloading. I've learned that this happens because synaptic is trying to launch software-properties-gtk, which no longer works. Here's it from a terminal.

pauljohn@pjlap-d7:~$ software-properties-gtk
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/software-properties-gtk", line 38, in <module>
    from softwareproperties.gtk.SoftwarePropertiesGtk import SoftwarePropertiesGtk
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/softwareproperties/gtk/SoftwarePropertiesGtk.py", line 39, in <module>
    from DialogCacheOutdated import DialogCacheOutdated
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/softwareproperties/gtk/DialogCacheOutdated.py", line 27, in <module>
    import aptdaemon.client
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/aptdaemon/client.py", line 70, in <module>
    class MemoizedMixIn(MemoizedTransaction, GObject.GObjectMeta):
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi/module.py", line 316, in __getattr__
    return getattr(self._introspection_module, name)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi/module.py", line 135, in __getattr__
    self.__name__, name))
AttributeError: 'gi.repository.GObject' object has no attribute 'GObjectMeta'

I'm wondering if I'm looking Jessie updates that will stabilize soon-ish, or if I have something broken that I need to try to fix. So I'm open to suggestions.

--
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science Assoc. Director
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 Center for Research Methods
University of Kansas University of Kansas
http://pj.freefaculty.org http://quant.ku.edu