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Bug 620778 - WINDOWPATH grows indefinitely
WINDOWPATH grows indefinitely
Status: RESOLVED OBSOLETE
Product: gdm
Classification: Core
Component: general
2.20.x
Other Linux
: Normal normal
: ---
Assigned To: GDM maintainers
GDM maintainers
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2010-06-06 22:06 UTC by Samuel Thibault
Modified: 2010-06-11 04:04 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---


Description Samuel Thibault 2010-06-06 22:06:26 UTC 
Hello,

After several login/logout cycles, the WINDOWPATH variable contains the VT number of the server several times: e.g. 7:7:7:7:7. This is not how gdm is supposed to behave: WINDOWPATH should only contain the VT number alone only.

This probably happens because somehow gdm erroneously sets the environment variable before forking, and thus on next cycle gdm_window_path() reads the value gdm has written itself.

gdm should be fixed into either setting the WINDOWPATH variable only in children, or into reading the original WINDOWPATH variable only once at startup, and not re-read during cycles.
Comment 1 Samuel Thibault 2010-06-06 22:07:10 UTC 
I forgot to mention: thanks to its rewrite from scratch, gdm 2.30 does not suffer from this. 2.20 is however still being used by quite a few distributions.
Comment 2 William Jon McCann 2010-06-11 04:04:25 UTC 
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.