Subject: bug#35484: GDM failing to start stumpwm after merge

From: Timothy Sample <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2019 23:10:26 -0400

Hi Ludo,

Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:

> Hi Tim,
>
> Timothy Sample <[email-masked]> skribis:
>
>> I can think of two options for a fix before 1.0 (which is supposed to be
>> tomorrow!).  The cute one is to just rename “Fail” to “~Fail”, on the
>> expectation that this will come after most other names when sorted.  The
>> ugly one is to patch GDM to exclude the placeholder file when looking
>> for “.desktop” files, and then to select it instead of raising an error
>> when it can’t find anything.
>>
>> My preference is for the ugly one, because the cute one feels like
>> putting a silly hack on top of silly hack – it’s just a bit too much.
>> I’ve attached a patch.  Thoughts?  (If I don’t hear anything, I will
>> push it – it’s important that this works for 1.0).
>
> I don’t have an opinion as I didn’t follow this closely.

Okay.  I picked the more robust solution, but I still hope it doesn’t
stick around too long.  :)

> Could you make sure the fix works with the DEs and WMs that the
> installer proposes (see (gnu installer services))?

I tested all of the DEs listed there except for MATE, which I could not
compile.  I had to patch i3 and awesome to use absolute paths in their
“.desktop” files.  (The “xinitrc” script can find the binaries in $PATH,
but GDM cannot find the “TryExec” binaries unless they are absolute.
This is no doubt related to the other $PATH issues we saw with GDM.)

> If it does, could you push it also to the ‘version-1.0.0’ branch?

I pushed three commits to master:

    1. e8c6e771c1 gnu: gdm: Avoid selecting the placeholder session.
    2. 4ec42524dd gnu: awesome: Use absolute paths in session file.
    3. aa7cdc57dc gnu: i3-wm: Use absolute paths in session files.

I then cherry-picked them onto the “version-1.0.0” branch.  Sorry if
that’s not what you meant.

> Thank you for looking into this!

No problem.  Thanks for the quick response!

-- Tim