bug#39281: gdm doesn't start

[Jack Hill]

On Mon, 27 Jan 2020, Raghav Gururajan wrote:

> > so I removed gnome-initial-setup from the propagated-inputs with the following 
> > patch, and, indeed,
> > that resolved the problem with gdm on my system.
>
> That's strange. Both our system share similar configuration. But for me 
> gdm works fine with gnome-initial-setup being present. This is 
> confusing.

Indeed, my system does have a really slow disk, so it would not surprise 
me if that contributed to it. Of course that shouldn't matter, but that's 
the only thing I can think it. It would be nice to hear if sirgazil can 
reproduce the fix since I think they were having the same problem on their 
computer.

> > While I'm still not exactly sure why this was causing gdm problems, and why 
> > `herd restart
> > xorg-server` caused gdm to start working correctly, I think that removing 
> > gnome-initial-setup from
> > the gnome meta-package is the right thing to do. Instead, perhaps it could be 
> > provided via its own
> > service, auto-selected by the installer. If I recall correctly from other 
> > distros (e.g. Fedora),
> > the gnome-initial-setup wizard is run from its own user on first boot, and 
> > after it finishes, the
> > user is logged in as themselves. That said, gnome-initial-setup did seem to run 
> > fine for me the
> > first time I logged into gnome after it was installed, and hasn't stared again.
> >
> > Thoughts?
>
> I would say debugging and fixing would be better than removing. Let me see what 
> I can do.

I agree that fixing is better than removing. Good luck debugging. I'm 
happy to test, but am currently out of ideas.

> > P.S. Thanks Raghav for your work on making gnome in guix a better experience!
>
> 10-4 on the sarcasm. ;-)

I'm glad that you took this well :). However, while I'm often sarcastic, I 
wasn't trying to be here. What I was trying to express was that while I'm 
currently running my system with gnome-initial-setup removed doesn't mean 
that I don't appreciate the change to make it present by default. 
Fortunately for me, Guix makes this easy compared to other systems!

Best,
Jack