[plug] odd file manager hangs

[Craig Ringer]

Cameron Patrick wrote:

> Some unsubstantiated speculation: I wonder if fam is causing any
> problems.  I've heard of it spontaneously getting confused and causing
> odd behaviour before... maybe you could try turning fam off and seeing
> if it fixes anything?

Nope, disabling FAM didn't help. The only effect was to cause Nautilus 
to spew a bunch of errors about FAMOpen failed, and for directory change 
notifcation to stop working (of course). I got a hang on the third try 
:-( for about 20s, which seems more normal.

It looks like the one I had before _was_ a bit different, because this 
time the context menu still worked in the window contents and the window 
was redrawing normally. Last time it /really/ died. I wonder if having 
strace attached caused it to somehow 'die harder' - after all, IIRC 
strace can change the behaviour of threaded apps.

*sigh*

Next stop, kernel upgrade. The thing is, I have the funny feeling I've 
seen this before I had to move the machine up to 2.6 . I wonder if it's 
some obscure glibc threading issue (after all, this machine's glibc is 
rather elderly and is an early NTPL-mangled version IIRC). Maybe I 
should do something scary involving a new glibc (after taking a full 
system snapshot of course) and see if things settle down.

Overall, it looks like it's getting to be time to bring this machine up 
to a more recent base OS. I'm seriously considering Debian again (once 
Sarge comes out) now that I've seen the wonders of backports.org, though 
I'm not too sure about Debian when it comes to GUIs. Maybe Gentoo in a 
UML for the GUI users (*shudders* - anybody taking over from me would 
HATE me).

--
Craig Ringer