Re: [Tails-dev] Help: GNOME Shell integration issue affectin…

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Author: Carlos Soriano Sanchez
Date:  
To: intrigeri
CC: Carlos Soriano, Federico Mena-Quintero, Frederic Peters, tails-dev
Subject: Re: [Tails-dev] Help: GNOME Shell integration issue affecting Tails
Hello Intrigeri,

Congrats for the upcomming 2.0 release! Happy to hear that.

So let me try to convince you instead to not use an extension.
Currently we implement those icons in a small left corner, which
is similar to top-icons extension. I'm not sure how longer valid
is that extension, and that's why probably doesn't receive too much
attention anymore.

In any case, I would recommend you to say this in the gnome-shell
mailing list to get some attention in case you still want it fixed.

I kind of don't like extensions, instead I would like upstream
contribution, that's why I hesitate to spend time on it.

Hope you all the luck!

Cheers,
Carlos Soriano

----- Original Message -----
| 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
|