bug#27264: gnome-shell-3.24.2 consistently dies during initialization

["pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <pelzflorian@pelzflorian.de>]

On Thu, Jun 08, 2017 at 02:01:22PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> I think many of us use GTK+/GNOME applications, but fewer use GNOME, so
> I suppose we just didn’t test a full GNOME setup.
> 
> Next time we should probably do that or, even better, have an automated
> test that logs in, takes a screenshot, and does some OCR to check
> whether we got something that looks like a GNOME screen.
>
> WDYT?
> 
> Ludo’.
> 

Like a reftest, i.e. comparing a screenshot to what one expects the
screenshot to look like? You can probably take a screenshot of the
GNOME desktop by running gnome-screenshot or by making a D-Bus call to
org.gnome.Shell.Screenshot.Screenshot for a new user (so themes do not
affect it) and compare what is shown in the upper left corner. It says
Activities and the font and color of the top left corner will
presumably change rarely.

A simpler and possibly preferable solution would be checking if GNOME
can successfully start an application set to autostart as per the xdg
desktop specification without gnome-session crashing.

I am not sure how such a test can be run without disrupting a running
login session. Possibly GNOME can be launched on an X server
configured to use xf86-video-dummy like I once tried on a headless
server, see:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Vino#Running_on_a_headless_server

I do not know if this can eventually be adapted to Wayland. Xdummy
probably does not support KMS which I believe is required on Wayland.

I so far have not got around to contributing code to the Guix project,
so I probably will not be implementing this either...

Regards,
Florian