problems replacing fam by gamin (was: going from XFCE to Gnome?)

On Sun, 2007-10-28 at 12:54 +0100, Florian Kulzer wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 27, 2007 at 03:24:28 -0700, Michael M. wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > I found a few problems on my system (Lenny/testing) after I replaced fam
> > with gamin:
> >
> > 1) Menus in OO.org took many seconds to open -- at least 15, perhaps
> > 20. This was extremely irritating and made OO.org a pain to use.
> >
> > 2) The GNOME trash applet no longer updated to show when there were
> > items in the trash. I could no longer empty the trash from the panel.
> > Not such a big deal, but I typically have most windows on most desktops
> > maximized so I don't usually make use of any icons on the desktop. So I
> > found it convenient to empty the trash from the panel.
> >
> > 3) Nautilus was considerably slower to respond to any attempts to open
> > a new window. The problem wasn't as severe as the problem with OO.org
>
> These seem to be pretty serious problems, worthy of being reported as
> bugs. I cannot comment any further on these issues since I don't use
> Gnome.

I wondered about that, but then I didn't know (heh, I almost typed
"gnow") whether they were GNOME bugs, OO.org bugs, or gamin bugs. I
never know what to do when it's the combination of packages that present
a problem, rather than a specific package.

> > Restoring fam and removing gamin put things back to normal. But the
> > reason I installed gamin in the first place is that exaile requires it,
> > so in the end I decided to remove a lot of GNOME and am using Openbox
> > instead. OO.org works fine with gamin, as long as you aren't using it
> > under GNOME. If you use it under GNOME, it appears you need fam, or
> > will face some major irritation. I still use the GNOME panel, mainly
> > because I love Tomboy and find a few other features of that panel
> > appealing, but I no longer use the Trash applet nor the trash bin at
> > all. I'm no longer using Nautilus, though it is still installed.
>
> I think it is unlikely that such obvious problems would go unnoticed by
> the (Debian-)Gnome community. Could you be missing some recommended
> packages? You could run
>
> aptitude search '!~i(~dgnome|~dgtk|~dopenoffice)~RBrecommends:~i'
>
> and check if anything suspicious turns up, for example something related
> to gnome-vfs. (This search command should find all not installed
> packages which have "gnome", "gtk" or "openoffice" in their description
> and which would satisfy a currently unfulfilled recommendation of some
> installed package.)

I regularly audit the recommendations using aptitude. The only problem
I could find was aptitude complaining about fam being uninstalled, which
of course I already knew.

In any case I've changed things all around again and have moved up to
unstable. I used to think that one day I would find the *perfect*
distro, configuration, and set of apps for me, but now I've realized
that the whole thing is perpetually a work-in-progress. :-)

--
Michael M. ++ Portland, OR ++ USA
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions
of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to
dream." --S. Jackson

--