dconf mmaps files in ~/.cache

[quentin]

geofft suggests this can be moved with XDG_CACHE_HOME

This combined with #1161 to cause my gnome-terminal to die and be un-re-launchable when my tickets expired. So I couldn't renew my tickets...

[andersk]

The XDG_CACHE_HOME move is #1109.

Experimentally, Lucid and Natty already mmapped the Fontconfig cache from ~/.fontconfig. Precise adds both ~/.config/dconf/user and ~/.cache/dconf/user, so this may not be completely solved by changing XDG_CACHE_HOME.

[jdreed]

And we can't obviously change XDG_CONFIG_HOME so we may in fact be SOL and/or relegated to trying to convince upstream to do something else or make whether or not to mmap user-configurable, but I don't see that happening.

[jdreed]

I'll note that authwatch(1) still works fine, and I suspect "grenew" would work even if your gnome-terminal didn't. We should still see what we can do to fix it, but "Don't let your tickets expire". It's possible that authwatch(1) should learn how to monitor tokens or something, but that may be hard.

[quentin]

I did in fact get the warning popup saying my tickets had expired; that caused me to switch to the gnome-terminal to type "renew", but my gnome-terminal disappeared before I could. Then I tried to use the menu to get to grenew, but the Unity launcher was hung. Maybe it would have worked if authwatch had a button to launch grenew? (Though I'm not sure I would have thought to use it.)

[jdreed]

Geoff posted some IRC logs that suggest we'll see a fix (or at least a better environment variable) in Quantal, and we can try and get it backported to Precise, I guess. Hooray for ecryptfs, which suffers from similar problems as AFS, with the added benefit that upstream actually pretends to care about its users.

[jdreed]

Do we have an LP bug or something? "October is sooner than you think"

[jdreed]

A quick test suggests this is no longer a problem?  LP:1156891 suggests it has been fixed, but also suggests the fix doesn't work in some circumstances.

Do we want to migrate to dconf keyfiles, which are plain-text files in the user's homedir, that then get compiled into a database in XDG_RUNTIME_DIR (which is in fact correctly set in Trusty)? This is a saucy+ feature.

[jdreed]

Note that migrating to dconf keyfiles requires a lot more effort. In particular:
a) we need to ensure XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is something sane, and if it's not (they're not using lightdm, for example), fix it and psosibly create the directory
b) we need convert a binary database to a keyfile (this is done with dconf dump / > keyfile). However, which do we prefer? A binary database from the N-1 release, or a keyfile from N-2? What if there is both a keyfile and binary database for N-1?

I'd rather avoid this, especially, because it sounds like the issue here was the poor interaction between xauth and dconf. I'm happy to add a "launch grenew" button to authwatch if that would be helpful.