[OE-core] Getting "menuconfig" to work again?

[Mike Looijmans]

On 01-01-16 18:58, Paul Eggleton wrote:
> Hi Mike,
>
> On Fri, 01 Jan 2016 10:18:55 Mike Looijmans wrote:
>> On 31-12-15 18:04, Leonardo Sandoval wrote:
>>> On 12/31/2015 07:58 AM, Mike Looijmans wrote:
>>>> On 31-12-15 14:55, Mike Looijmans wrote:
>>>>> When running a "menuconfig" (or any other task that needs a terminal),
>>>>> bitbake just "stops" and doesn't show any terminal.
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm using the current master branch of everything, on Ubuntu 15.
>>>>>
>>>>> When running with "-D" I can see the following log:
>>>>>
>>>>> DEBUG: Executing task do_menuconfig
>>>>> DEBUG: Attempting to spawn terminal "custom"
>>>>> DEBUG: No custom terminal (OE_TERMINAL_CUSTOMCMD) set
>>>>> DEBUG: Attempting to spawn terminal "tmux-running"
>>>>> DEBUG: Attempting to spawn terminal "tmux-new-window"
>>>>> DEBUG: Attempting to spawn terminal "gnome"
>>>>>
>>>>> But nothing happens from that point.
>>>>
>>>> Extra info: apparently it spawns a process:
>>>>
>>>> /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/gnome-terminal --version
>>>
>>> gnome-terminal is a pain... there are some checks base on the version
>>> and based on that certain parameters are set. which g-t version are you
>>> using?
>>
>> $ gnome-terminal --version
>> GNOME Terminal 3.14.2
>>
>>>> If I kill that process, the menuconfig magically appears.
>>
>> Digging into the source code, I saw that "gnome-terminal --version" is
>> only being called to determine if the "--disable-factory" option should
>> be passed to it. For some reason, in OE that call "hangs", I suspect
>> because of the way the environment and pipes are laid out at that point.
>>
>> If I just run 'gnome-terminal -t hello --disable-factory -x sh' I don't
>> get any errors and it works just fine. To me it looks like the whole
>> version check could be removed and always pass "--disable-factory".
>
> Unfortunately that's what we did earlier and it was fine until gnome-terminal
> stopped accepting that option. Perhaps it's now a no-op in the version you're
> using, I'm not sure; but in 3.10 they made it trigger an error.

Nice... For me simply removing the "version" part fixed the problem. A simple 
"try and ask forgiveness" patch wasn't as simple as I thought, the actual 
terminal command execution is being done elsewhere.

On newer Ubuntus, the "--version" just hangs, probably waiting for terminal 
input or something silly like that.

For now, I'd say removing the version check would be better - if you happen to 
have that bad 3.10 version, you get a nice error message. That's a lot easier 
to diagnose than a hangup.

> It ought not to be too hard to fix the hanging - hopefully someone with a GNOME
> desktop installed (not me) can figure out what's happening there.

To be quite honest, I don't know what desktop I'm running. I just run whatever 
was default with Ubuntu, so that might be Gnome...




Kind regards,

Mike Looijmans
System Expert

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