Comment 86 for bug 328575

BlueSky wrote:
> Lecturing them on the dangerousity of their ways is just an excuse not to fix the bug.

> I do not mean to attack you personally, but I just hate it when people say "why do you do that anyway?" or
> "it's much better if you do it the other way" when there is a real bug.

 Thanks for the comments. You're right, I went way overboard with the lectures against running too much as root, when all that was called for in that space was workarounds that would let people do the things they wanted to. I see how that would give the impression that it's actually the user's fault, not a bug (which is not the case.)

 I've tried to make it more clear that this should be considered a bug. e.g. "Workarounds:" ->
"Workarounds to use until the bugs are fixed:". Although I did already try to make it clear that this is still a bug, not just simply the new way that GNOME works. OTOH, unless gnome-terminal will just work without gconf, this bug will probably take a long time to get fixed, since it's the result of the design, not just a problem implementing it correctly. That's what I was trying to make clear, and prepare people for a long wait.

 It's true that my "workarounds" for root and remote usage cases are what I do anyway, and I do in fact consider them better than actually running gnome-terminal as root, or remote-displaying it. That's what makes them such great workarounds... (esp. since I'm a command line guy, and I always have gnome-terminal open, and usually have a shell already cd'ed to whatever directory I want to do something in... This is not the case for everybody, e.g. the people who want to start a shell from nautilus. That's fine, use your computer however you want, as long as it's not a security disaster that's going to have your computer infected and trying to crack mine and relaying spam.) Without the big lecture, I'm probably less likely to put people off actually trying anything I suggested.

> running gnome-settings-daemon is not always an acceptable workaround, since it messes up with gtk+ themes, desktop background, etc

 Isn't it just providing settings that were configured when you still used GNOME? If you had an empty ~/.gnome* and ~/.gconf*, wouldn't you get the same defaults as when gconfd isn't running at all? (try moving those directories aside before deleting them). I guess really you just need gconfd, which is started by gnome-settings-daemon. Does running
/usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconfd-2&
change your themes and fonts? Or only g-s-d? If it's ok, then you could update the workaround to suggest just that, instead of g-s-d.