Bug#973485: gdm3 starts gnome instead of .xsession even when "Default X11 session" is selected

[Christoph Berg]

Re: Simon McVittie
> Please try with gdm3_3.38.2-1 when it becomes available on your mirror.

Hi,

I confirm that both the "System X11 Default" and "Default X11 Session"
options start my .Xsession file. (Iirc the second option was missing
in the old version.)

Thanks, and sorry for having been so indignant about the BTS
situation.

Christoph

Bug#973485: gdm3 starts gnome instead of .xsession even when "Default X11 session" is selected

[Simon McVittie]

On Mon, 02 Nov 2020 at 11:46:55 +, Simon McVittie wrote:
> On Sat, 31 Oct 2020 at 16:35:27 +0100, Christoph Berg wrote:
> > gdm3 does not start my ~/.xsession anymore but boots gnome instead.
> 
> I think the root cause might be
> . Do you see
> "has_option: not found" in the system log (systemd Journal or syslog)
> during login? If you apply the patch from that bug to /etc/gdm3/Xsession,
> does that work? It seems to work for me, with my openbox-based reproducer.

Please try with gdm3_3.38.2-1 when it becomes available on your mirror.

smcv

Bug#973485: gdm3 starts gnome instead of .xsession even when "Default X11 session" is selected

[Christoph Berg]

Re: Simon McVittie
> If your intention was to make me or another active team member feel
> guilty enough to drop everything and spend a day triaging, I'm sorry,
> but that isn't sustainable: if I take on extra responsibilities every
> time someone complains about a team that I'm already trying to help,
> that's how we get burned-out maintainers who abandon the project and leave
> the remaining team members more overloaded. Even if we don't care about
> maintainers' well-being (which we should), that seems counterproductive.

Sorry that wasn't my intention.

If triaging the old bugs doesn't work because no one is doing it, I'd
say it's better to close all bugs that haven't been updated for a year
or so, with a message asking to reopen if the problem is still
present. Of course that's not the normal way we handle bugs, but
leaving 300 bugs open (and most of them unattended) isn't useful.

Christoph

Bug#973485: gdm3 starts gnome instead of .xsession even when "Default X11 session" is selected

[Simon McVittie]

Control: tags -1 + confirmed moreinfo

On Sat, 31 Oct 2020 at 16:35:27 +0100, Christoph Berg wrote:
> gdm3 does not start my ~/.xsession anymore but boots gnome instead.

I can reproduce this with "#!/bin/sh", "exec openbox" in a test user's
~/.xsession. (Obviously you need openbox for that to work, or replace
openbox with whatever you actually wanted to run.)

I think the root cause might be
. Do you see
"has_option: not found" in the system log (systemd Journal or syslog)
during login? If you apply the patch from that bug to /etc/gdm3/Xsession,
does that work? It seems to work for me, with my openbox-based reproducer.

(My understanding is that gdm doesn't/can't use the centralized
/etc/X11/Xsession from x11-common because its calling convention is
different.)

> Sorry if that bug was already reported, but no way I'm going to read
> through the 300 (!) open gdm3 bugs. Please do some BTS house keeping.

Sorry, the Debian GNOME team do not have the resources to work through
the GNOME packages' backlog of years-old bugs. I wish we could, but the
active team members are as overloaded as all the other major teams,
and it's as much as we can do to keep up with recent bug reports. If
you can help, please do.

User-facing desktop packages attract a steady stream of bug reports,
many of them unclear or from inexperienced users who need a lot of
help before they can provide enough information to understand the bug,
for components throughout the stack (because there's no good way for a
non-developer to know that a symptom in "GNOME" might really be a bug
in something like gnome-settings-daemon, Mesa or the kernel).

I sometimes put a few hours into dealing with older bug reports, but I
can't do that routinely, and the result is usually not noticeable. People
in Debian tend to get upset at any suggestion that we might consider
closing old bugs without being able to point to a specific code change
that fixed them, so the default is that they stay open forever, making
it a daunting task to even start triaging.

If your intention was to make me or another active team member feel
guilty enough to drop everything and spend a day triaging, I'm sorry,
but that isn't sustainable: if I take on extra responsibilities every
time someone complains about a team that I'm already trying to help,
that's how we get burned-out maintainers who abandon the project and leave
the remaining team members more overloaded. Even if we don't care about
maintainers' well-being (which we should), that seems counterproductive.

smcv

Bug#973485: gdm3 starts gnome instead of .xsession even when "Default X11 session" is selected

[Christoph Berg]

Package: gdm3
Version: 3.38.1-2
Severity: grave

gdm3 does not start my ~/.xsession anymore but boots gnome instead.

Sorry if that bug was already reported, but no way I'm going to read
through the 300 (!) open gdm3 bugs. Please do some BTS house keeping.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: bullseye/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (700, 'testing'), (600, 'unstable'), (150, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 5.9.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU threads)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_FIRMWARE_WORKAROUND, TAINT_OOT_MODULE, 
TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=de_DE.utf8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8), 
LANGUAGE=de:en_US:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages gdm3 depends on:
ii  accountsservice   0.6.55-3
ii  adduser   3.118
ii  awesome [x-window-manager]4.3-5
ii  dbus  1.12.20-1
ii  dconf-cli 0.38.0-1
ii  dconf-gsettings-backend   0.38.0-1
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.74
ii  gir1.2-gdm-1.03.38.1-2
ii  gnome-session [x-session-manager] 3.38.0-2
ii  gnome-session-bin 3.38.0-2
ii  gnome-session-common  3.38.0-2
ii  gnome-settings-daemon 3.38.0-2
ii  gnome-shell   3.38.1-1
ii  gnome-terminal [x-terminal-emulator]  3.38.0-1
ii  gsettings-desktop-schemas 3.38.0-2
ii  libaccountsservice0   0.6.55-3
ii  libaudit1 1:2.8.5-3.1
ii  libc6 2.31-4
ii  libcanberra-gtk3-00.30-7
ii  libcanberra0  0.30-7
ii  libgdk-pixbuf2.0-02.40.0+dfsg-5
ii  libgdm1   3.38.1-2
ii  libglib2.0-0  2.66.1-2
ii  libglib2.0-bin2.66.1-2
ii  libgtk-3-03.24.23-2
ii  libkeyutils1  1.6.1-2
ii  libpam-modules1.3.1-5
ii  libpam-runtime1.3.1-5
ii  libpam-systemd246.6-2
ii  libpam0g  1.3.1-5
ii  librsvg2-common   2.50.1+dfsg-1
ii  libselinux1   3.1-2+b1
ii  libsystemd0   246.6-2
ii  libx11-6  2:1.6.12-1
ii  libxau6   1:1.0.8-1+b2
ii  libxcb1   1.14-2
ii  libxdmcp6 1:1.1.2-3
ii  lsb-base  11.1.0
ii  mutter [x-window-manager] 3.38.0-2
ii  policykit-1   0.105-29
ii  procps2:3.3.16-5
ii  rxvt-unicode [x-terminal-emulator]9.22-8
ii  ucf   3.0043
ii  x11-common1:7.7+21
ii  x11-xserver-utils 7.7+8

Versions of packages gdm3 recommends:
ii  at-spi2-core2.38.0-2
ii  desktop-base10.0.3
ii  x11-xkb-utils   7.7+5
ii  xserver-xephyr  2:1.20.8-2
ii  xserver-xorg1:7.7+21
ii  zenity  3.32.0-6

Versions of packages gdm3 suggests:
pn  gnome-orca
pn  libpam-fprintd
ii  libpam-gnome-keyring  3.36.0-1

-- debconf information:
* shared/default-x-display-manager: gdm3
  gdm3/daemon_name: /usr/sbin/gdm3

Christoph