Getting harder and harder to debug startup probs

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2012-02-13 at 10:59 +0000, M A Young wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Feb 2012, Matthias Runge wrote:
> 
> > More general:
> >
> > If you're hit by some bug, you get lost; nowadays sooner than later. I
> > can't count, how many times I had some error getting X up (or even
> > system up) since the move to systemd.
> >
> > Next sad thing is, it isn't reproducible every time. Since we're
> > testing moving targets, it's pretty unclear, how to reproduce the
> > situtation _now_ on _my_ special system? Since I can't login, I can't
> > get a package list.
> 
> It isn't just systemd. I don't think gnome-shell helps either, because you 
> tend to get an unhelpful "blue screen of death" type message if something 
> goes wrong making it difficult to work out what the problem is. Previously 
> the system continued as best it could, meaning you might see what the 
> problem was in what did and didn't appear on the desktop, and might get 
> enough functionality on the desktop to debug the problem more easily.

I'd say the answer to the question is 'no, it's just different'.

systemd actually makes it *easier* to debug startup issues, really,
because it has good and sophisticated tools for investigating the status
of all services and the dependencies between them. But it's _different_
from sysv/upstart, and you have to learn how to use the tools and logs.
Once you do that, it's actually much better. You can see from the bug
report how Kay diagnosed this particular dbus/dracut issue: you can do
that too. Also learn how to use systemctl - the man page is great.

For Shell, whatever causes the fail whale will almost invariably be
pointed up by ~/.xsession-errors; you just have to read it carefully.
The fail whale comes up if any one of a certain set of core GNOME
components spawns (runs) more than twice within a 60 second period -
this is intended to catch crash/respawn loops. So you're looking for a
component - usually shell itself, or gdm, or gnome-settings-daemon -
crashing more than once.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
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