Non-GNOME sessions' terminals are broken in Jaunty

[geofft]

Essentially all non-GNOME sessions want you to start off with a terminal, which Debian makes sure is x-terminal-emulator, which is gnome-terminal. At some point between Intrepid and Jaunty, gnome-terminal started failing to launch if gnome-settings-daemon isn't running, rather than just launching with vaguely ugly default settings. This is pretty poor for the usability

We should figure out what's going on here, and work around it somehow, e.g.:

• Figure out if there's a setting or environment variable to make the lack of gnome-settings-daemon noncritical, or to make it spawn if needed.
• Start gnome-settings-daemon in every session.
• Make the non-GNOME sessions use xterm instead.

[jdreed]

If this means that, e.g. the Failsafe Terminal session doesn't work, we should also report that upstream.

[quentin]

This only happens if gnome-terminal is the very first GNOME app you launch in your session; it explicitly checks whether a gconfd is running and bails if it isn't. Other apps just use gconf without checking, and it obliges them by spawning a new gconfd. This is upstream at  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gconf2/+bug/328575

The maintainer of gnome-terminal says this is fixed in 2.27.91; maybe we can prod Ubuntu into doing a backport and/or cherrypick the patch?

[broder]

Is there some ultra-secret source repo for gnome-terminal that I don't know about?

All I can find is  http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gnome-terminal/refs/. The most recent version it lists is 2.26.3.1; I can't find a 2.27.91 anywhere, and that seems entirely out of style with the other tags.

[geofft]

The ultra-secret sources for 2.27.91 are at
 http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnome-terminal/2.27/

[broder]

Ok, figured it out.

2.27 is active development, which actually corresponds to master in the git repo. The commit in question that fixes this is  f41c3d14bdfd533109d7d75bdbb2e2a0ab59b60c f41c3d14.

However, the Debian gnome-terminal maintainer added the distinctly less clever patch 02_let_gconf_autostart.patch in 2.26.2-2, which has now been merged into Karmic, fixing the bug (which was also tracked as  DebianBug:531734). This is basically equivalent to  GNOME:564649#c5 on the upstream bug.

I'm not sure whether to backport the Debian fix or the upstream fix for an SRU. I'd also kind of like to cherry-pick the upstream fix into Ubuntu since it's less dumb. And Debian, for that matter.

[broder]

Err...Trac ate the commit. That's  f41c3d14

[broder]

SRU patch created and attached in  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gconf2/+bug/328575/comments/65

[broder]

This bug was fixed in the package gnome-terminal - 2.26.0-0ubuntu2.1

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gnome-terminal (2.26.0-0ubuntu2.1) jaunty-proposed; urgency=low

Just went into jaunty-updates today, so this should be fixed.