app-admin/gkrellm randomly freezes

orionbelt · Apprentice Joined: 05 Apr 2006 Posts: 178

I am experiencing precisely what is described in this bug. I am quoting: "Apparently for no reason after a while (it can be hours, it can be days, etc.) gkrellm interface is frozen, responsive to right-click or other user input, however its GUI (i.e. cpu /memory/disk graphs) is updated only when there's some user interaction with X".

This bug reports dates from 2017-07-21 but it only received one comment saying that the bug tracker is meant for "specific problems in .ebuilds" and not for problems such as the above, for which we are urged to use IRC, mailing lists, Gentoo support or these forums.

I thought the bug tracker is for all sorts of problems, although of course some bug reports may have to be passed on upstream (this bug might be one such case?) whereas others may result from errors made by the reporter.

So i would like to ask (i) whether the aforementioned is truly the official bug tracker policy, and (ii) whether anyone can help with resolving the reported problem with gkrellm, either in the bug tracker or in here.

Thanks!

krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

of course not, bugtracker is not only for ebuild!

think about it, it's not because you use gkrellm and it froze "in your gentoo", that gkrellm will froze on another distro, so you cannot bug gkrellm authors without first trying to remove a possible cause done by your own system.
if really gkrellm was doing that because of gkrellm, then many users from many distros would had report it, and the gkrellm authors would then dig why their program is freezing like that.

but what is not really for bugtracker is long discussions, and i think that's why it has been closed, user didn't start to produce any help or hint to find where the issue is coming from, no log, no strace, no debug, nothing just a : it froze, here's my emerge --info.
such thing should be handle in irc, because it's easier: guys ask you "do that", you do, and tell the result, then guys react to it, ask you something else... until issue is found and fix (or the guys died trying).

while forum offer more or less the same as bugzilla, bugzilla is getting quiet messy after a few talks and example/code, while the forum remain ease and nice to use.
but even the forum has its limit, it's better to gave a link to wgetpaste than directly put that in the forum for huge code per example.
irc is bad at keeping knowledge, sure some server do keep track of what is said in irc, but it's hard to find the info you need, but irc is top for reactivity, which is what you should need for such problem that will need lot of tests and search to track it down.
what you should do is just wait for it to freeze, and then go in irc and see if anyone is able to help while it is frozen.
because if you try that on forum, you will wait for it to freeze then post... then get a "try that" answer which mean keeping it freeze as long as you need to test something while it is frozen, which could take days in forum.

bunder · Bodhisattva Joined: 10 Apr 2004 Posts: 5934

Just throwing it out there, since gkrellm is an older gtk2 app (and I'm not sure if it's going to be upgraded to gtk3)... but have you tried conky? It's a little less easy to set up than gkrellm (and it doesn't have a network daemon, but ssh x forwarding fixes that), but I'm quite happy with it, and I haven't used gkrellm in a few years now.

orionbelt · Apprentice Joined: 05 Apr 2006 Posts: 178

Sorry for the belated reply...

krinn: Yeah, i do understand the relative merits of bugzilla vs forum vs IRC, but in this case it's not that the discussion on bugzilla got out of hand: there was no discussion at all. If the bug reporter did not provide enough information, he could have been asked to do so (as it happens with many other bug reports). Instead, he was told that "We can not help you efficiently via bug tracker. The bug tracker aims rather on specific problems in .ebuilds and less on individual systems". I agree that, in a case like this, interactive help via IRC could be useful, but (a) the best people to answer IRC questions are usually not online when you need them, especially for "niche" programs that only few can really help with, and (b) as you said, IRC is not good as a repository of knowledge.

In the meantime, i have redirected my gkrellm's error messages to a file so that i can provide more details to the bug report when it happens again, hoping that someone will read it and be able to help...

bunder: Thanks for the conky suggestion ;-)

I guess that for now the gkrellm bug occurs seldom enough that my level of discomfort with it is not sufficiently strong to look for alternatives. But it's an interesting suggestion to keep in mind. In the meantime, it wouldn't do any harm if we tried to fix gkrellm...