Mouse focus stealing bug

[Maros Zatko]

Hello dear Fedora comunity,

I've hit very weird bug which happen to get very urgent now.
Something (very likely GTK{2,3} but not sure at all) is stealing my 
mouse focus
so that I cannot click anymore. Symptoms are in range from being able to 
click
once or several times AFTER switching desktop (tag), to being able to 
click only
with left button (with right being totally unresponsive) to not being 
able to click
at all anymore until I kill Xorg.

Killing Xorg was *the fix* -- for you to understand, after reboot I 
*had* to kill Xorg
session three times, with spawning some GTK app in between runs so that 
I hit
the issue and Xorg restart had the right effect.
What happens now is that Xorg restart are NOT helping any more, i.e. 
after that
it "works" for about 5 minutes and then it get progressively more and more
wrong until I cannot click any more.

My nowadays combo is Xmonad with nm-applet and some other basics plus
firefox, xchat, pidgin and some gnome-terminals (and couple of other random
stuff). To hit the issue is enough to spawn xchat and firefox in a clean 
session.

I've been hitting the very same issue before when I was using Awesome WM,
but I thought it was its issue so I've picked xmonad but after some time 
the same
issues returned.

So, dear Fedora community, I beg you for help. I have no idea how can I 
fix this,
nor how can I debug it. Any help would be really welcome.

Thank you,
Maros

[Peter Hutterer]

On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 01:19:54PM +0200, Maros Zatko wrote:
>  Hello dear Fedora comunity,
>  
>  I've hit very weird bug which happen to get very urgent now.
>  Something (very likely GTK{2,3} but not sure at all) is stealing my
>  mouse focus
>  so that I cannot click anymore. Symptoms are in range from being
>  able to click
>  once or several times AFTER switching desktop (tag), to being able
>  to click only
>  with left button (with right being totally unresponsive) to not
>  being able to click
>  at all anymore until I kill Xorg.
>  
>  Killing Xorg was *the fix* -- for you to understand, after reboot I
>  *had* to kill Xorg
>  session three times, with spawning some GTK app in between runs so
>  that I hit
>  the issue and Xorg restart had the right effect.
>  What happens now is that Xorg restart are NOT helping any more, i.e.
>  after that
>  it "works" for about 5 minutes and then it get progressively more and more
>  wrong until I cannot click any more.
>  
>  My nowadays combo is Xmonad with nm-applet and some other basics plus
>  firefox, xchat, pidgin and some gnome-terminals (and couple of other random
>  stuff). To hit the issue is enough to spawn xchat and firefox in a
>  clean session.
>  
>  I've been hitting the very same issue before when I was using Awesome WM,
>  but I thought it was its issue so I've picked xmonad but after some
>  time the same
>  issues returned.
>  
>  So, dear Fedora community, I beg you for help. I have no idea how
>  can I fix this,
>  nor how can I debug it. Any help would be really welcome. 
sounds like a stuck grab. that can be a bug in the server or the
application, but it's notoriously difficult to debug.

grabs are triggered by keyboard shortcuts, popup/dropdown menus and by
simple button presses (i.e. drag and drop usually triggers a grab). 

generally if grab is stuck, the client with the grab still receives events,
so you may be able to narrow it down by clicking and hoping that _something_
responds to the click. that is the client with the grab then.

You'll have to figure out a reproducible test case because there are so many
factors at play and the code is so convoluted that debugging this otherwise
is almost impossible.

Cheers,
  Peter

[Jan Pokorný]

On 31/08/13 09:36 +1000, Peter Hutterer wrote:
>  On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 01:19:54PM +0200, Maros Zatko wrote:
> > Hello dear Fedora comunity,
> > 
> > I've hit very weird bug which happen to get very urgent now.
> > Something (very likely GTK{2,3} but not sure at all) is stealing my
> > mouse focus so that I cannot click anymore. Symptoms are in range
> > from being able to click once or several times AFTER switching
> > desktop (tag), to being able to click only with left button (with
> > right being totally unresponsive) to not being able to click at all
> > anymore until I kill Xorg.
> > 
> > Killing Xorg was *the fix* -- for you to understand, after reboot I
> > *had* to kill Xorg session three times, with spawning some GTK app
> > in between runs so that I hit the issue and Xorg restart had the
> > right effect.  What happens now is that Xorg restart are NOT
> > helping any more, i.e.  after that it "works" for about 5 minutes
> > and then it get progressively more and more wrong until I cannot
> > click any more.
> > 
> > My nowadays combo is Xmonad with nm-applet and some other basics
> > plus firefox, xchat, pidgin and some gnome-terminals (and couple of
> > other random stuff). To hit the issue is enough to spawn xchat and
> > firefox in a clean session.
> > 
> > I've been hitting the very same issue before when I was using
> > Awesome WM, but I thought it was its issue so I've picked xmonad
> > but after some time the same issues returned.
> > 
> > So, dear Fedora community, I beg you for help. I have no idea how
> > can I fix this, nor how can I debug it. Any help would be really
> > welcome. 
Started to occur to me from time to time as well (LXDE@F18, inputs come
through synergy).

Last time, I think it started in connection with Firefox, and
fortunately it stopped with exiting Firefox.  In the meantime,
the treatment was to either switch to another virtual desktop
(and I am not sure if I used to right-click anything here) and
back, or to right-click bottom panel.

>  sounds like a stuck grab. that can be a bug in the server or the
>  application, but it's notoriously difficult to debug.
>  
>  grabs are triggered by keyboard shortcuts, popup/dropdown menus and by
>  simple button presses (i.e. drag and drop usually triggers a grab). 
>  
>  generally if grab is stuck, the client with the grab still receives events,
>  so you may be able to narrow it down by clicking and hoping that _something_
>  responds to the click. that is the client with the grab then. 
Yep, it looked like intended client was overriden, at least for
the part of the observed behavior.

>  You'll have to figure out a reproducible test case because there
> are so many
>  factors at play and the code is so convoluted that debugging this otherwise
>  is almost impossible. 
Unfortunately.  And backtracking which update introduced this issue would
be unrealistically time consuming provided that the reproducer seems
to be quite random.  So my hope is it will go away the same way it
arrived.

-- 
Jan

[Maros Zatko]

On 09/10/2013 09:47 PM, Jan Pokorný wrote:
>  On 31/08/13 09:36 +1000, Peter Hutterer wrote:
> > On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 01:19:54PM +0200, Maros Zatko wrote:
> >> Hello dear Fedora comunity,
> >>
> >> I've hit very weird bug which happen to get very urgent now.
> >> Something (very likely GTK{2,3} but not sure at all) is stealing my
> >> mouse focus so that I cannot click anymore. Symptoms are in range
> >> from being able to click once or several times AFTER switching
> >> desktop (tag), to being able to click only with left button (with
> >> right being totally unresponsive) to not being able to click at all
> >> anymore until I kill Xorg.
> >>
> >> Killing Xorg was *the fix* -- for you to understand, after reboot I
> >> *had* to kill Xorg session three times, with spawning some GTK app
> >> in between runs so that I hit the issue and Xorg restart had the
> >> right effect.  What happens now is that Xorg restart are NOT
> >> helping any more, i.e.  after that it "works" for about 5 minutes
> >> and then it get progressively more and more wrong until I cannot
> >> click any more.
> >>
> >> My nowadays combo is Xmonad with nm-applet and some other basics
> >> plus firefox, xchat, pidgin and some gnome-terminals (and couple of
> >> other random stuff). To hit the issue is enough to spawn xchat and
> >> firefox in a clean session.
> >>
> >> I've been hitting the very same issue before when I was using
> >> Awesome WM, but I thought it was its issue so I've picked xmonad
> >> but after some time the same issues returned.
> >>
> >> So, dear Fedora community, I beg you for help. I have no idea how
> >> can I fix this, nor how can I debug it. Any help would be really
> >> welcome.
>  Started to occur to me from time to time as well (LXDE@F18, inputs come
>  through synergy).
>
>  Last time, I think it started in connection with Firefox, and
>  fortunately it stopped with exiting Firefox.  In the meantime,
>  the treatment was to either switch to another virtual desktop
>  (and I am not sure if I used to right-click anything here) and
>  back, or to right-click bottom panel. 
Yep, sometimes it's Firefox, sometimes
gnome-terminal.
In other cases it's caused by xchat. And 100% chance to
stuck your mouse is to have it grabbed by qemu which then
dies ungracefully (crashed; killed).
> > sounds like a stuck grab. that can be a bug in the server or the
> > application, but it's notoriously difficult to debug.
> >
> > grabs are triggered by keyboard shortcuts, popup/dropdown menus and by
> > simple button presses (i.e. drag and drop usually triggers a grab).
> >
> > generally if grab is stuck, the client with the grab still receives events,
> > so you may be able to narrow it down by clicking and hoping that _something_
> > responds to the click. that is the client with the grab then.
>  Yep, it looked like intended client was overriden, at least for
>  the part of the observed behavior.
>
> > You'll have to figure out a reproducible test case because there are so many
> > factors at play and the code is so convoluted that debugging this otherwise
> > is almost impossible.
>  Unfortunately.  And backtracking which update introduced this issue would
>  be unrealistically time consuming provided that the reproducer seems
>  to be quite random.  So my hope is it will go away the same way it
>  arrived.
>  
One of possible "remedies" is to switch to VT{1-5} then switch to Xorg.
Observed behaviour is that dzen2 panel is gone but Xmonad still works,
to that I'm able to switch tags but I can't see on which one I'm located
nor other provided info, BUT I can click. Then when I restart/reload WM
I able to click again until the same thing happens again.

I suspect that it's caused by something old-and-rotten in my .config 
directory
or some old gconf setting that I don't understand at all.