GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 486939
Changed configuration file quoting format breaks upgrades
Last modified: 2010-06-04 21:04:05 UTC
[ forwarded from http://bugs.debian.org/445947 by Javier Kohen ] After upgrading to this version I noticed that GDM was failing to restart. The culprit was a configuration line in the servers section of gdm.conf. The previous version of gdmsetup had created the following entry: 0=Standard -layout \"Single LVDS\" However, the latest version of GDM was choking on the space. Removing the backslashes before the quotes solved the issue. I set the severity to important because this breaks perfectly working setups created with the bundled configuration utility. The manual fix is trivial, though. I don't know whether the latest version of gdmsetup writes the backslashes or not. ---- In Debian we consider this bug as release-critical as it is breaking the configuration file across upgrades. I am very interested to know what are your plans about it. If you decide to keep this new file format, we will have to write a hack that changes the quotes in the configuration file.
Could anyone please comment on this bug? We need to know how we should deal with our upgrades.
This probably broke because a lot of cleanup work was done in GDM 2.20. Basically the way GDM reads its configuration file was completely ripped out and replaced. Previously it used a private vicious-extensions library and now it uses the glib keyfile interfaces, which are probably better maintained and more stable. The existing gdmsetup just has an entry field for entering options. We need to check if it is putting the backslash in there. If it is, and if this breaks the command, then we should either fix it so it doesn't do this, or so that the code accepts commands with the backslash quotes (probably better if this is the way the old GDM worked). I haven't heard that this is causing problems for other users. I would accept a patch to fix GDM to be better backwards compatible.
I have just checked that gdmsetup 2.20 doesn't write broken files for GDM 2.20. The problem is with files written by earlier versions of gdmsetup that break after the upgrade. I guess we will just need an ugly sed script to replace \" with " in gdm.conf. Bleh.
FYI, I have added the sed hack to the upgrade script. You might want to fix the documentation to tell other distributors to do the same.
Thanks for taking the time to report this bug. However, you are using a version that is too old and not supported anymore. GNOME developers are no longer working on that version, so unfortunately there will not be any bug fixes for the version that you use. By upgrading to a newer version of GNOME you could receive bug fixes and new functionality. You may need to upgrade your Linux distribution to obtain a newer version of GNOME. Please feel free to reopen this bug if the problem still occurs with a newer version of GNOME.