The state of rawhide

Jonathan Corbet lwn-ft at lwn.net
Thu Feb 1 18:21:54 UTC 2007


So...I've been finding the rawhide experience to be a little more raw
than usual since about when FC6 came out.  I've not seen a lot of
complaints, though, which leads me to wonder if I'm the only one.
Here's some of what I've encountered on my x86-64 system:

 - The system thrashes.  I guess I'm an old-fashioned sort of guy, but I
   really think that 1GB ought to be enough to run a basic desktop, even
   on a 64-bit system.  Firefox, Thunderbird, and Liferea are all leaky
   as sieves; I have to restart them occasionally or the system just
   bogs down.  There is a memory-leak in gnome-terminal that I can't get
   the developers to even look for.  Tomboy is huge, but that may just
   be part of life with mono.

 - Gnome-terminal occasionally becomes unresponsive.  Some windows work,
   others do not - though they usually come back eventually.  This
   behavior seems to be correlated with the memory problems, but the
   system is not thrashing while I'm waiting for a terminal to
   acknowledge my existence.  

 - Gnucash now refuses to start.  I get a lot of messages like "Failed
   to dlopen() '/usr/lib64/gnucash/libgncmod-hbci.la': file not found".
   The interesting thing being that the indicated files *do* exist.  

 - Metacity occasionally gets hung.  It happens most often when trying
   to resize a window, but I can also occasionally see it when using
   menus from the panel at the bottom of the screen.  The pointer goes
   into an "I'm busy" state, and nobody gets any more keyboard or mouse
   events.  Switching out of X and back (alt-ctrl-F1) makes the hang go
   away.

 - I still have to clear out /var/lib/rpm/__db* fairly often.

Now I'm not complaining.  I know the drill, and I'm sufficiently
masochistic (and backed up) to run rawhide on a system I use for real
work.  But I begin to wonder if there might be something that has gone
fundamentally wrong on my system, or if this is just the way rawhide
works these days...?

Thanks,

jon




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