[Tails-dev] Help: GNOME Shell integration issue affecting Ta…

Hi,

I am a contributor to the Tails project (https://tails.boum.org/),
a live system aimed at preserving its users' safety, privacy and
anonymity, focusing on ease of use for non-technical users. To give
you an idea of the impact of the problems I'm asking for help here,
we're talking about a system that is started more than 17,000 times
a day.

I believe that some of you have met one of my team-mates at GUADEC
2015, who raised your names when I asked him who I could ask for help;
hence this email :)

We are about to release Tails 2.0 in a week. It will be our first
release based on Debian 8 (Jessie), and more to the point here, our
first release that includes GNOME Shell as the default (and only)
desktop environment. Woo!

There's a glitch though: during the beta and RC phases, many testers
reported to us serious bugs with how icons in the top-right tray are
displayed. Probably relevant is the fact that we include the topIcons
extension (because not all the important status icons have been
migrated to more modern GNOME technologies yet). But not only icons
moved by topIcons to the top-right tray are affected.

TBH, I personally came to the conclusion that the bug most likely
lives in the topIcons extension. I can very well understand if you see
it as none of your business for this reason, and I have reported it to
this extension's author already.

Still, we're in a hard place on our way to ship GNOME Shell right now,
because sadly, nobody on our team has the skills to debug this
problem, so we help from any skilled people would be much appreciated.

The symptoms we see are:

* Widgets in the top-right tray are somewhat narrowed (to their
arrow, with a dot instead of the expected text); I've seen this
happen at least for the date/time and the ibus menu icon:

https://labs.riseup.net/code/attachments/download/1186/new-session.png
https://labs.riseup.net/code/attachments/download/1180/1.png
https://labs.riseup.net/code/attachments/download/1181/2.png
https://labs.riseup.net/code/attachments/download/1182/3.png
https://labs.riseup.net/code/attachments/download/1183/4.png

* The clickable area and the icon of a widget moved by topIcons are
not at the same place. For example, nothing happens when I click on
the Florence icon, but Florence appears when I click elsewhere (on
the left of the OpenPGP Applet). This screenshot shows what is the
clickable area for Florence at this point:

https://labs.riseup.net/code/attachments/download/1173/clickable%20area.png

Enabled extensions:

* Classic mode extensions:
apps-menu@??? and
window-list@???

* topIcons v28

* a custom Tails extension called shutdown-helper@???:

https://git-tails.immerda.ch/tails/tree/config/chroot_local-includes/usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/shutdown-helper@tails.boum.org?h=testing

Other possibly relevant information:

* We run GNOME Shell 3.14.4-1~deb8u1 in Classic mode.

* The ISO image for Tails 2.0~rc1 can be downloaded from
https://tails.boum.org/news/test_2.0-rc1/ — it's a live system, so
you can try it out in a virtual machine, after dd'ing it to a USB
stick, or burning it to a DVD.

* I don't seem to be able to reproduce these bugs with an ISO that
has the topIcons extension disabled. It seems that a loaded (or
just slow) system exposes the problem more often than a powerful
and idling system.

* I've seen similar bug reports online elsewhere:

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/495/topicons/
https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/2g06t7/icons_disappearing_from_notification_tray_using/

* In an environment (Spice/QXL/QEMU VM) where I can dynamically
change the display size & resolution, making the display way bigger
fixes the bug, and reverting to the initial display size reverts
back to the problematic initial state.

* There is one error in the logs that I only see when the bug
happens:

gnome-session[2343]: (gnome-shell:2871): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: /build/glib2.0-EvFudu/glib2.0-2.42.1/./gobject/gsignal.c:2579: instance '0x94b20f0' has no handler with id '32170'

It refers to
https://sources.debian.net/src/glib2.0/2.42.1-1/gobject/gsignal.c/?hl=2501#L2579

When this happens, I also see:

gnome-session[2003]: (gnome-shell:3042): Gjs-WARNING **: JS ERROR: TypeError: parent is null
gnome-session[2003]: onTrayIconRemoved@/usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/topIcons@???@gmail.com/extension.js:115


* Another piece of logs that we (sometimes) see when the problem happens:

gnome-session[30034]: (gnome-shell:30263): Gjs-WARNING **: JS ERROR: TypeError: parent is null
gnome-session[30034]: moveToTop@/usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/topIcons@???@gmail.com/extension.js:135

gnome-session[29844]: (gnome-shell:30074): Clutter-WARNING **: Attempting to add actor of type 'ShellTrayIcon' to a container of type 'ShellGenericContainer', but the actor has already a parent of type 'ShellGenericContainer'.

* The https://github.com/wincinderith/topicons fork has changes in
areas that might be relevant to the problems we see. We've not
tested it so far.


Is there any information you need from us to debug this problem?
I'm sure those of us who see this problem would be glad to test
patches aimed at fixing it.

Please don't hesitate forwarding this message to anyone you think
might want to give us a hand.

Cheers!
--
intrigeri