[Pkg-xfce-devel] Bug#714480: Bug#714480: Unable to start xfce if home in different locations

[Yves-Alexis Perez]

On mar., 2013-07-02 at 22:21 -0700, Carlo Contavalli wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 10:32 PM, Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac at debian.org> wrote:
> > On lun., 2013-07-01 at 22:06 -0700, Carlo Contavalli wrote:
> >> On Sun, Jun 30, 2013 at 1:25 PM, Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac at debian.org> wrote:
> >> > On sam., 2013-06-29 at 12:35 -0700, Carlo Contavalli wrote:
> >> >> This bug to track two things:
> >> >> 1) it'd be nice to log those messages somewhere, so one can find them in the logs.
> >> >
> >> > Aren't they in .xsession-errors?
> >>
> >> argh, missed it. Good point, thanks, was probably looking in the wrong place :).
> >>
> >> >> 2) xfce4 should use ~/ or any other mechanism to detect the position of the home directory, rather than hard code paths.
> >> >
> >> > ~ is a shell alias, nothing you can pass to glib.
> >>
> >> uhm .. wordexp() can expand it if needed, you could easily fetch home
> >> with getpwent() or looking at $HOME and replace /home/myhome with ~
> >> when storing the path, and the other way around when referring to it.
> >
> > Sure, a lot of stuff is possible. It's also a lot of work and something
> > which can open a can of worms.
> 
> agreed. But certainly something that could be supported in glib or
> through any other API if deemed useful.

I'm pretty sure this kind of aliasing already has been discussed in glib
and/or GTK+. If it wasn't added, there might be good reasons (aliasing
and permission checking usually don't match very well).
> 
> >> Eg, if you wanted to, you could support the use case.
> >
> > Actually, no, I couldn't. I'm a Debian packager, not upstream. This is
> > not the correct place to have a debate over upstream code, for that you
> > need bugzilla (http://bugzilla.xfce.org) or mailing lists
> > (https://mail.xfce.org/mailman/listinfo/)
> 
> Will bring it up upstream, thanks for the pointer.
> 
> This is probably not a good idea here - I don't disagree. But your
> role as a packager certainly does not preclude modifying the code.
> There's plenty of other packages in Debian that have been modified to
> provide a better user experience / integration / fix bugs that were
> not fixed upstream.

Sure, we usually try to cherry pick some upstream fixes, and it goes the
other way too, when we fix something in a Debian package we forward it
upstream so it can get included. But when it comes to large features
(and supporting ~ expansion is one, imho), we usually prefer to at least
have upstream point of view.

> 
> >> The question in
> >> general is if having the same home mounted in different places or
> >> having the ability to move the home directory without issues should be
> >> supported, and if not, where to document it.
> >
> > Actually you seem to be the first one in years to even try, so I'm
> > pretty sure it's not really something people need. Also, afaict (but
> > since you only gave some examples, I can't be completely sure) it
> > especially affects the session cache, which is definitely not something
> > I'd like to share on multiple boxes.
> 
> Not sharing session cache on multiple boxes sounds reasonable. The
> point here is that xfce4-session does not start up properly and gives
> me a crippled user experience whenever I try to do any of the things I
> pointed out previously.

Yeah, that's a bit bad. Note that in any case, the session filename
includes the hostname so it shouldn't even try to load the session
cache.


Regards,
-- 
Yves-Alexis
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