I recently updated some of the MATE components for Tribblix. On testing, various bits of MATE didn't work. Worse, various bits of Xfce didn't work.
The first issue that was fairly easy to solve was that MATE was looking for its menus under /etc/xdg/menus, whereas it had installed them under /usr/etc/xdg/menus. I had to set XDG_CONFIG_DIRS=/usr/etc/xdg in the MATE session startup scripts, and the menus reappeared.
Slightly trickier was that all the mime associations had stopped working. For everything - MATE, Xfce, and any other desktop that uses the shared desktop mime infrastructure.
There are various desktop caches that have to be kept up to date. Each cache is handled by an SMF service, so if you know a cache needs to be updated, then you just get a package to kick the service whenever it's installed or uninstalled. I had inherited these from OpenIndiana which got them from OpenSolaris, so they have gnome in the package name even though they're really more generic.
Each of these SMF services has a method script that follows the same pattern. First check to see if anything needs doing, then update the cache if necessary.
This logic is, in some cases, plain broken. There's a python script that does the check, and in most cases the check is much more expensive than actually updating the cache. For a couple of the services, I had already simply ignored the check and blindly done the update. In particular, for updating the icon cache, which is the most common case.
Another problem with this check is that if you add an old package or untar some old files, there's the possibility that the "new" files you've just added get ignored because they have older timestamps than the cache. This shouldn't be a problem because the search looks for ctime, but some things reset that as well.
This time, the mime caches got broken. This only happened because there's normally one package - shared-mime-info - providing the mime types. Nothing else updates it. Until MATE comes along.
I had a bit of a dig, and this python script turns out to have python2.4 in it's shebang. Oops! I've never shipped python older than 2.7, so this never worked. The method scripts redirect errors to /dev/null so they're never seen. The fact that this stuff worked at all was a complete accident, with the cache file being created the first time and never updated since.
There's a desktop mime cache, and that's pretty quick, so that was easy - just do the update without checking, and it's at least twice as quick.
The main mime cache is the one where the update itself is very expensive - it's almost 3s, which would be an eternity during every boot if it's done unconditionally. So for that I had to fix the python shebang and keep the logic intact.
As an aside, the package that delivers the SMF scripts and manifests hadn't been updated in ages, and I hadn't documented how it was built. Updating is easy - just take the existing package, modify, and repackage it. But I put together a desktop-cache repo on github to hold it so I don't have to go dumpster-diving next time.
While I was at it I discovered that the package dependencies weren't quite right (the SMF methods clearly depend on the packages supplying the binaries that update the caches), and the way I had put these into the Tribblix overlays wasn't quite right, so I sorted that out too.
All in all, a lot of effort to sort out something that shouldn't have been broken in the first place. Hence the tale of woe.
Oh, and there's a third bug I haven't yet tracked down. Sometimes the MATE file manager, caja, goes into a loop trying to open a png file under ${prefix}. Yes, the actual open() call includes a literal ${prefix}, so something hasn't been substituted in the code correctly.
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