Bug#303687: Dumps core on start

[Thomas Bushnell BSG]

Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> writes:

> An strace shows that libgconf11 is trying to start gconfd-2, not gconfd-1.
> It succeeds in starting it, then fails to find the control file in the
> desired gnome 1.2 location.

Ok, then perhaps it's true that fixing libgconf11 is best.
Regardless, those packages are both maintained by the same (generally
nonresponsive) maintainer. 

> It's because it's trivially fixable that I believe it's unreasonable to ask
> the user to have to employ such workarounds by hand.  Saying "you must create
> this symlink before the package is usable" is a *major* usability gaffe.
> Documenting it is not a substitute for providing a suitably usable package;
> it's far more trivial for you to kludge around this problem in the package
> than to ask each user to do so individually.

My first inclination was simply to add a tweak to the script to create
the necessary symlink.  But this seems brittle; it will prevent the
program working correctly on a gnome-1 system, won't it?  By contrast,
starting gconfd-1 is also surely wrong; my understanding is that it is
seriously wrong to have both gconfd-1 and gconfd-2 running at the same
time, but perhaps I'm understanding incorrectly.  And starting
gconfd-1 is brittle also, even if harmless, because it might already
be running.

So I'm happy to put either of these or something else in the gnucash
startup script if you can explain which you think best and why.

> Actually, in my case I have some reports open by default in my
> configuration; this causes gnucash to crash on startup if I don't already
> have gconfd-1 running, or haven't created the compat symlink.  Since there's
> no GNOME 1.2 environment available in sarge, I'm certainly not going to have
> gconfd-1 running by default.

Sure, but that's still not RC.  The bug doesn't prevent gnucash from
working, it simply requires you to put a symlink in place.

If you are correct that the bug is in libgconf11, then it is certainly
in the current sarge version also.

Thomas