bug#24445: GNOME desktop session crash when re-arranging dock

[Mark H Weaver]

address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Mohammed Sadiq <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>> This crash appears to happen on dragging anything on gnome-shell.
>>
>> Eg:
>> 1. If a window is dragged in shell overview
>> 2. if a window in desktop list (in the right side) is dragged.
>> 3. if some icon from Application list is dragged.
>>
>> Also, the immediately followed drag after the first failure results in a 
>> total
>> crash losing all the open window and goes back to slim login.
>
> A serious problem.
>
>> So the bug severity may be increased if this is reproducible to some
>> one.

The same bug has been present in GNOME on GuixSD since the beginning of
our GNOME support.  I can confirm that it's 100% reproducible on my
GuixSD system, and as I recall it's been confirmed by David Thompson and
Andy Wingo at least.

> Mohammed, do you think this could be Guix-specific?  Intuitively I would
> guess that this can only be an upstream bug, but you know GNOME better
> than I do.  :-)

I can confirm that the problem does not occur on Debian, and I've not
found reports of it happening on any other mainstream distro.  I would
guess that our unusual filesystem layout prevents GNOME Shell from
finding something that it's looking for, and that the error handling in
that case is deficient or non-existent.

In case anyone missed it, Thomas Danckaert recently made a significant
contribution to discovering the cause of this bug, and provided a
workaround:

  https://bugs.gnu.org/24445#8

Given this, I suspect that it would not take long for a motivated
developer to complete the investigation and fix this bug properly.

       Mark