Bug#1036232: org.gnome.Shell.desktop[…]: Window manager warning: Failed to parse saved session file:

[Simon McVittie]

Control: severity -1 minor
Control: tags -1 + wontfix

On Wed, 17 May 2023 at 18:43:48 +0000, Al Ma wrote:
> In my journal I discovered a message that a saved session file could not be
> parsed:
...
> Mai 17 20:03:29 AnonymizedComputerName org.gnome.Shell.desktop[1049]: Window
> manager warning: Failed to parse saved session file: Datei »/var/lib/gdm3
> /.config/mutter/sessions/1012a34d79e815c63f168434660681766700000010100000.ms«
> konnte nicht geöffnet werden: Datei oder Verzeichnis nicht gefunden

If this isn't implicated in any user-visible problem, then it's almost
certainly harmless, and definitely not Severity: important.

The gdm display manager runs gnome-shell in a special mode to provide
its "greeter" (login prompt) user interface, but there isn't really
any state in that session that would be useful to save, so the fact that
gdm can't load a saved state is not doing anyone any harm.

Arguably the fact that it tries to load a saved session file and logs a
message while in this special mode is a minor bug, but gnome-shell is a
large, user-facing component with many more users than developers, and
as a result, a very large number of bug reports that are more serious
than this one.

If this offends you, then you could do the research into why this is
appearing and send a merge request upstream to silence it; but please
bear in mind that even if you take the time to do that, the time needed
for a developer to review whether that contribution is correct would be
time that they cannot spend on something with a higher impact, like for
example diagnosing and fixing a crash.

This is unlikely to be fixed as a Debian-specific change. Any change has a
risk of causing regressions, so we have to weigh up that risk against the
benefit of fixing a bug. If the bug is minor, then the maximum possible
benefit is very small, so any risk at all would be a problem.

    smcv