2.4.6 gconfd-2 repeated crashes OS X

[John Ralls]

On Jun 2, 2011, at 10:01 PM, Mike Alexander wrote:

> --On June 2, 2011 3:11:40 PM -0700 John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
> 
>> The rpath is changed during bundle creation. Everything is built with
>> a prefix of /Library/Gnucash-2.4; that's why the symlink works. (It's
>> necessary because dbus has hardcoded paths in it, apparently because
>> Havoc thinks that makes it more secure. Ideally there would be no
>> need for the symlink and the kludgy shell script to set it up.) The
>> rpath is just as invalid when dbus-daemon is started from the shell
>> script. What's different, I think, is in that case the environment,
>> including DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH, gets passed to gconfd and it can find
>> its dependencies. It appears that when launchd handles launching
>> dbus-daemon that the environment is not passed to gconfd, so it can't.
>> 
>> No matter, it's easy enough to go back to the shell script until I
>> have time to get rid of dbus and gconf altogether.
> 
> I'm confused, but that's not unusual.  Since you build with that prefix and add a symlink to make it valid, why do you have to do the rpath renaming?  It seems like you could just leave things as they are built and things would work, including having launchd launch dbus.  What am I missing?  It seems a shame to go back to the business of spawning an arbitrary number of dbus processes if it's easy to avoid it although I grant that they don't cost much.
> 

It's a general-purpose bundler, not gnucash-specific. I don't particularly want to add a "don't rewrite rpaths" option for it; I'd rather spend that time working on Mac-specific gdbus  backend.

The script does a reasonable job of killing off the old dbus instances. No argument that when it works, the launchd approach is much nicer. Like I said, I'll try a static build of GConf at some point. That might get around the problem. Production releases aren't the right place to be doing experiments like that, though, so I've reverted 2.4.6 to the shell script launch of dbus and I'm not inclined to change that for any 2.4 release.

Regards,
John Ralls