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Bug 114219 - Shouldn't reuse existing process if DISPLAY is different
Shouldn't reuse existing process if DISPLAY is different
Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE
Product: epiphany
Classification: Core
Component: General
3.4.x (obsolete)
Other Linux
: Normal normal
: ---
Assigned To: Epiphany Maintainers
Epiphany Maintainers
: 137907 463515 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2003-06-01 23:25 UTC by Joe Shaw
Modified: 2015-09-24 18:42 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---



Description Joe Shaw 2003-06-01 23:25:46 UTC
I just ssh'ed into a machine which had epiphany running on the local display.  When I ran 
epiphany again, it said it was going to use the existing process instead of creating a new 
one.  Epiphany should check to make sure that DISPLAY is the same before doing that.
Comment 1 Dave Bordoley [Not Reading Bug Mail] 2003-06-02 03:25:24 UTC

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 112779 ***
Comment 2 Marco Pesenti Gritti 2004-03-26 11:18:26 UTC
*** Bug 137907 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 3 Marco Pesenti Gritti 2004-03-26 11:20:23 UTC
Allowing multiple instances of epiphany to share the same profile is not simple.
We store a lot of data in our profile and additionally there is the problem that
we have to address it in two different platforms (mozilla and epiphany).
See http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/shared_profiles.html to start
feeling the pain.

Problems are technically solvable but they would need extensive changes to
mozilla code to be done correctly. Without a strong buy in of the mozilla
developers that doesn't seem very likely to happen. Obviously this is a serious
issue for Firebird/Mozilla too.

Possible solutions in detail.

Mozilla:

Cookies - IPC
Cache - A major rewrite necessary to deal with file sync issues. Having a
separate cache for each instance sounds like a pain for users.
Certificates - Upgrade db would be enough ?
Preferences - IPC if done on the mozilla side. Maybe it would be worth to
implement mozilla preference service using gconf instead which would solve some
other issues.
Password Manager - Same as cookies I guess.

Epiphany:

History - Definately a data server or a multi process database.
Bookmarks - Ideally data server. Maybe a reload-when-file-changed hack could
work too.
Comment 4 pah06 2004-08-09 02:24:56 UTC
Would it be simpler to modify the Mozilla source to allow different DISPLAY's
for different windows? I'm not that proficient at X coding so I'm not sure how
hard this would be. I would imagine the code in Mozilla to be layered so that we
have:

  Window handling code
  Display handling code (font issues, rendering, etc.) <- does this exist?
  Cache and network code

Basically cache and network code should be DISPLAY independent. The other layers
should be DISPLAY dependent, but never write directly to file.

This would avoid the problem of having multiple instances of Epiphany/Mozilla
using the same directory. In this specific instance I think that is all that's
required. I only comment because this is a problem for me as well (I SSH into my
laptop from where I run Epiphany).
Comment 5 Christian Persch 2004-10-13 10:55:57 UTC
Mass reassigning of Epiphany bugs to epiphany-maint@b.g.o
Comment 6 Diego Escalante Urrelo (not reading bugmail) 2007-09-23 13:54:13 UTC
*** Bug 463515 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 7 Javier Jardón (IRC: jjardon) 2009-08-12 21:49:35 UTC
You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue for you.

Can you please check again if the issue you reported here still happens in a recent version and update this report by adding a comment and adjusting the 'Version' field?

Again thank you for reporting this and sorry that it could not be fixed for the version you originally used here.

Without feedback this report will be closed as INCOMPLETE after 6 weeks.
Comment 8 Gustavo Noronha (kov) 2009-08-21 22:31:53 UTC
This 'works' with the current epiphany-webkit package in Debian unstable, but I don't think this is what we want - Epiphany starts thinking it crashed the last time it was run. This sounds like data loss _will_ happen to me to people trying to use this 'feature'. Maybe we need to turn this into a bug to have Epiphany disallow running two processes in this case.
Comment 9 Javier Jardón (IRC: jjardon) 2009-08-21 22:45:27 UTC
(In reply to comment #8)
> This 'works' with the current epiphany-webkit package in Debian unstable, but I
> don't think this is what we want - Epiphany starts thinking it crashed the last
> time it was run. This sounds like data loss _will_ happen to me to people
> trying to use this 'feature'. Maybe we need to turn this into a bug to have
> Epiphany disallow running two processes in this case.

Maybe use libunique  ( http://live.gnome.org/LibUnique ) library could be a solution?
Comment 10 Gustavo Noronha (kov) 2009-08-23 22:07:41 UTC
(In reply to comment #9)
> Maybe use libunique  ( http://live.gnome.org/LibUnique ) library could be a
> solution?

Not sure. Epiphany already does what libunique would do (connect to the session bus, try to grab its well-known name, call a method to open a new window instead of launching a new process). I think the problem here is that the ssh session doesn't know about the user's desktop session, so it doesn't see an instance is already running.
Comment 11 Tobias Mueller 2010-02-11 18:56:40 UTC
Reopening as the information requested in comment #7 has been provided.
Comment 12 Tobias Endrigkeit 2012-10-29 19:46:58 UTC
You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it
recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue for you.

Can you please check again if the issue you reported here still happens in a
recent version and update this report by adding a comment and adjusting the
'Version' field?

Again thank you for reporting this and sorry that it could not be fixed for the
version you originally used here.

Without feedback this report will be closed as INCOMPLETE after 6 weeks.
Comment 13 Stanislav Brabec 2012-10-30 15:05:51 UTC
Yes, it is still valid.

epiphany --version
WWW 3.4.2


How to reproduce:

As root:

X -ac :2

As user:
DISPLAY=:2 epiphany &
epiphany

Second command should open window in the current display, but it does not.
Comment 14 André Klapper 2012-10-30 15:42:05 UTC
=> Resetting NEEDINFO.
Comment 15 Michael Catanzaro 2015-07-19 02:06:49 UTC
(In reply to Stanislav Brabec from comment #13)
> Second command should open window in the current display, but it does not.

Is this different from the behavior of other GtkApplications?
Comment 16 Michael Catanzaro 2015-09-24 18:42:58 UTC
Closing old NEEDINFO bugs