Comment 53 for bug 616997

Vish: Cool you followed through on this - thanks! Your test output indicates that all the tests are happy. Which is good of course, but deepens the mystery...

Markus: Thanks for the xsession-error log!

Looking in both of your xession-error logs I see a:

  (mutter:1347): libunity-private-CRITICAL **: file places/places-place-entry.c: line 785: uncaught error: Message did not receive a reply (timeout by message bus) (dbus-glib-error-quark, 4)

In Markus' file this is line 151 - right after the place is triggered. The same line appears in Vish's error log. This is a bit suspicious... If we let the question of why this timeout rest for now (as that's a problem in another process), I am thinking that it may have some side effects triggering some bug in dbus-lib or libunity-private, that again cause libdee to receive corrupted data in import_model(). This is pure speculation of course.

In the code you are running now Unity dispatches a synchronous dbus call to activate the place - this call times out for some reason (which means that the place is to slow to respond, which is another bug in itself). Since sync dbus calls are the root of all evil we are on a quest to replace all of them with async ones. In the updates slated for this Thursday (packages prolly available Friday) most of the sync calls should be removed - which *may* mean that this bug resolves itself...

So if you are really impatient you can compile Unity trunk yourselves (warning: this is not easy), or you can hold on and see if the Friday updates magically fixes this. If not, we'll get back onto it!