cairo menu: endless disk IOs on "removing icon" on the Places icon

[lapa]

Thanks for the great work! I really like the cairo menu. I compared it with YAMA and found it uses less memories for doing the same thing.

However, I do notice a repeatable problem with it. I tried to remove the Places item from cairo menu by right clicking on it and choosing "Remove Icon". Nothing happened to the menu but I ended up with endless disk IOs till I kill an awn-applet process.

Here are what I saw from gnome-system-monitor:

Process Name: awn-applet
Status: Uninterruptible
Waiting Channel: jbd2_log_wait_commit
awn-applet -p /usr/share/avant-window-navigator/applets/cairo-menu.desktop -u mmmm -w nnnnnn -i 1
(where mmmm and nnnn are two integers).

Open files by this process:
/home/pingli/.config/desktop-agnostic/instances/.goutputstream-xxxxxx (xxxxxx will be changing).

* Distribution name and version
Arch Linux with latest updates

* Method of installing Awn and Awn Extras (if via repository, which repository? If from source, via tarball or bzr? any other distribution-specific configuration with regards to these packages?)
Offical packages from Arch Linux repository:
http://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/i686/avant-window-navigator/
http://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/i686/awn-extras-applets/

* Awn and Awn Extras versions (if from bzr, which branch and which revision?)
avant-window-navigator 0.4.0-6
  awn-extras-applets 0.4.0-4

* Window manager used when running Awn
Openbox 3.4.11.1 with xcompmgr

* Video card and driver name/version (for example, nvidia GeForce2 GTS/Pro, nvidia binary drivers version 7182)
xf86-video-intel

* If it's a crash/segfault, a backtrace.
None

[moonbeam (rcryderman)]

lapa,

Do you know which configuration backend is in use? gconf or keyfile?

[Michal Hruby (mhr3)]

@moonbeam: Looks like the lda keyfile bug?

[moonbeam (rcryderman)]

Michal,

Yeah, that's my first thought.

[lapa (lapa-lapa)]

Hi moonbeam,

I'm not sure how to tell which confguration backend is in use... I have gconf and there are keys like "apps/avant-window-navigator/applets/..." in gconf-editor and XML files under the ~/.gconf/apps/avant-window-navigator/applets directory.

[lapa (lapa-lapa)]

There are also .ini files for cairo menu in ~/.config/desktop-agnostic and its instance sub-directory.

[moonbeam (rcryderman)]

To the best of my knowledge Arch packages only included the keyfile backend. The apps/avant-window-navigator/applets/ path is mostly a relic of 0.3.x series (and earlier) though there are a couple 0.4 applets that still keep info there.

Basically we seem to be triggering some bugs in the lda keyfile backend in a few cases. The exact cause of the issue hasn't been tracked down yet.

[lapa (lapa-lapa)]

I updated to the latest versions of avant-window-navigator, awn-extras-applet and libdesktop-agnostic in the repository. Now the problem was gone. I noticed "config" was changed from "ini" to "gconf" in /etc/xdg/libdesktop-agnostic/desktop-agnostic.ini.

Thanks, guys!