GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 134668
mapping-daemon blocks unmounting $HOME
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
The mapping-daemon process remains running for some time after a user logs out. Because mapping-daemon runs with $HOME as its CWD, its existence will block the unmounting of $HOME. This presents a major problem with automatically mounted/unmounted home directories. Gconfd-2 had a similar problem. Gnome-session now runs gconftool-2 --shutdown to fix this when a user logs out (see bug #97361). A similar technique could be used with mapping-daemon or I think mapping-daemon could simply change its CWD to be outside $HOME.
Hmmm, changing cwd to e.g. / means that core dumps won't work, but i guess thats not so important for people in general. fixed in head
the way a similar bug was resolved for bonobo-application-server was to not change cwd if a special environment variable is set (see bug #134668), which still allows for getting core dumps if you are doing development. dunno if you want to standardize on that sort of arrangement or not, but you might want to consider it at least.
It's already the case for most system daemons, the root can change the core pattern and users can still get the backtrace through bug-buddy.