[Pkg-xfce-devel] Bug#725077: xfce4-genmon-plugin: may prevent session start if the started process opens /dev/tty

[Vincent Duvert]

Package: xfce4-genmon-plugin
Version: 3.4.0-2
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

I have noticed after misconfiguring a genmon plugin that if the started
application tries to read from /dev/tty (for instance, svn asking a password),
not only genmon freezes, but the whole session may block as well.

I have reproduced the problem with those steps:
1) Create a new user
2) Log in as this user, run startxfce4, use the default panel parameters
3) Create a shell script which does nothing (I used #!/bin/sh \n exit 0)
4) Add a generic monitor to the panel, configure it so it starts the shell
script
5) Log out
6) Add "cat /dev/tty" to the shell script
7) Run startxfce4 again

On my system, the background and the Xfce panels start to appear, but then
everything freezes (the mouse still moves and Ctrl-Alt-Fx still works, tough)

I think that in my case it also caused lightdm to abort the session start (i.e.
after entering the username/password and clicking Login, the screen goes blank
for some seconds and the prompt reappears), but I haven’t tried to reproduce
it with my testcase so it may be an unrelated problem.



-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.10-2-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages xfce4-genmon-plugin depends on:
ii  libatk1.0-0          2.8.0-2
ii  libc6                2.17-92+b1
ii  libcairo2            1.12.16-2
ii  libfontconfig1       2.10.2-2
ii  libfreetype6         2.4.9-1.1
ii  libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0   2.28.2-1
ii  libglib2.0-0         2.36.4-1
ii  libgtk2.0-0          2.24.20-1
ii  libpango-1.0-0       1.32.5-5+b1
ii  libpangocairo-1.0-0  1.32.5-5+b1
ii  libpangoft2-1.0-0    1.32.5-5+b1
ii  libxfce4ui-1-0       4.10.0-3
ii  libxfce4util6        4.10.1-1
ii  xfce4-panel          4.10.1-1

xfce4-genmon-plugin recommends no packages.

xfce4-genmon-plugin suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information