Bug#500430: gconf2: gconfd-2 not shutting down after user's logout

[Loïc Minier]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> > Confirmed. The file is "~/.gconfd/saved_state". gconfd-2 keeps it open
> > for about 30 seconds after the session is closed.
> Thinking about it, it is strange that, even while only local locks are
> used, the log file is put in /home. It should land in the same directory
> as the lock, which means in /tmp/gconfd-$user. It will also avoid a lot
> of unnecessary writes over the network for NFS homes.

 This solution is probably not suitable for 2.24:
2.23.2
======
  Features
  - stop using /tmp for the IOR, instead use the DBus session bus (Ray Strode)

 I grepped the source for /tmp, and only the testsuite seems to use that
 nowadays.


 Sadly, gconfd/saved_state is still used for similar logging which is
 used to restore listeners when gconfd restarts (AIUI).


 The log files is used in two ways: continuous logging happens all the
 time, and will be used if the process dies badly, and if the process
 gets the time to shutdown decently or for some signals, it will save
 its state to a new file, and overwrite the logfile with this state
 before exiting.

 I'd say that the open file, the continuous write to a real file (which
 might spinup the hard disk IIUC or cause network IO as you point out)
 is completely an obsolete use case, and we should simply rely on the
 latter part of the saving process.
   Perhaps we can propose that upstream.

-- 
Loïc Minier