GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 588607
xkbcomp errors should be displayed
Last modified: 2012-02-10 23:49:42 UTC
When the user runs gnome-keyboard-properties and some of his settings cause xkbcomp to fail, the user gets a general error message about "Error activating XKB configuration" and some obscure hints as to where the cause might lie. The same holds for starting a Gnome session with a broken configuration. This leads to little information available to diagnose such issues. Instead, I would like to see the precise error message from xkbcomp displayed to the user. I encountered cases where the information provided there was much more useful to actually locate and solve the problem. I guess fixing this problem might include several packages. gnome-settings-daemon is where the current error dialog is generated, but the actual call to xkbcomp seems to be in libxklavier, with libgnomekbd in between. Feel free to adjust the package this bug refers to as you see fit. Other information: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-settings-daemon/+bug/328980
As of gnome-settings-daemon 2.25.1 resp. git changeset 015e92a82c6bd19b, stderr is no longer closed, so users have a good chance to find the error messages of xkbcomp in their ~/.xsession-errors. I had observed the complete loss of all error messages in 2.24.0 (Ubuntu intrepid) and only noted the absence of additional information from the error dialog in 2.26.1. While I still would like to see error messages from xkbcomp directly in the error dialog, it might be a good first step to change the text of that error dialog to point out ~/.xsession-errors as this modification is much easier. The activation_error function in plugins/keyboard/gsd-keyboard-xkb.c contains the text that would need to be changed. Adjusting translations for one more item of an enumeration should be feasible even without knowledge of the languages.
Do people still see those errors? I'd rather fix the source of them than try to make this horror of a dialogue include even more information.
Martin, do you have any update for the bug ?
(In reply to comment #3) > Martin, do you have any update for the bug ? No, I don't. I've fixed my own underlying problem long ago, and haven't even been using Gnome at all in quite a while. So I couldn't tell from personal experience. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xkeyboard-config/+bug/67188 had a HUGE list of different problems, all resulting in the same unspecific error message. It was my primary motivation for filing this report here. That bug has been closed invalid, due to the mess it had become, and users were asked to file separate new reports, hopefully based on details from ~/.xsession-errors. As I'm not involved with these bugs, I'm not sure how much users are still seeing errors like this. So all I could do is search the web for "Error activating XKB configuration" and try to estimate the current scope of this problem based on these results. I would guess that users are still filing bug reports with insufficient information, and other users are not filing bug reports but are simply annoyed by the lack of details, but both of these are mere guesses.
Closing this bug report as no further information has been provided. Please feel free to reopen this bug if you can provide the information asked for. Thanks!