Bug#452469: gnome: hang for some time at startup

[Josselin Mouette]

Le jeudi 29 novembre 2007 à 13:06 +0100, Remi Vanicat a écrit :
> There is the tall of a hanging gnome.

Thanks a lot for the investigation.

> A long time ago, an automount was available, whose name was
> /net/maison. As content of this automonted directory was useful two
> thing happen:
> - .gtk-bookmarks contain file:///net/maison/mp3/newmp3

This is the faulty one I guess.

> Then, my ISP change the configuration of dhcp generated resolv.conf adding a
> "search neuf.fr"
> part to it, and maison.neuf.fr does resolv to a machine that drop
> sunrpc conexion, so when someone try to acces to
> /net/maison/mp3/newmp3 for example, there is a timeout before failure.
> 
> So I've solved my problem, but still it seem that gnome-panel and
> nautilus are doing some synchron file check that could make them hang.

Indeed, they are looking for all bookmarks to see if they actually exist
before displaying them. This allows to handle gracefully removed
directories or temporary mounts. I don’t think this can be fixed easily,
because you can’t differentiate such bookmarks from remote ones without
a stat(), and this is the system call that causes the hang. Even using
asynchronous operations wouldn’t fix such an issue.

My personal recommendation would be to avoid automounters in all
situations. They can cause various kinds of non-trivial hangs, and are
best replaced by hard NFS mounts.

If you really want to see this fixed in GTK+, gnome-panel and nautilus,
you should discuss it with upstream developers, because the complexity
of the task is completely out of the scope of Debian packaging. Is it OK
to close the bug?

Cheers,
-- 
 .''`.
: :' :      We are debian.org. Lower your prices, surrender your code.
`. `'       We will add your hardware and software distinctiveness to
  `-        our own. Resistance is futile.
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