Re: GNUstep lock issues

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

> On 28 Feb 2016, at 09:20, Riccardo Mottola <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I experience lately problems with "someone broke our lock" issues and other 
> Lock related exceptions.
> I have experienced this on NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux, clang or gcc, it is not 
> OS nor compiler dependant. It happens on plain uniprocessor computers.
> 
> I know that Gregory had some issues too. Greg, maybe you can add information?
> 
> Usually the nuiseance happens when launching a GS application when one is 
> already running (e.g. one runs Terminal or GWorkspace and launches 
> application X).
> I think that latley it is happening really a lot.
> The most common thing is that you canot start an application and get a popup. 
> Retrying a couple of time helps.
> Sometimes, like what happened just to me, you leave things running and get 
> back to the computer and found one app died leaving that in the console.
> 
> Maybe writing defaults is related, but it could be something related.
> 
> It surely makes using more apps and thus having a Desktop quite have a bad 
> thing now. I think we need to dig it out before release. The issue is... I 
> have no way to reliably reproduce that

It sounds like you are probably talking about filesystem locks (inter-process) 
rather than processor (inter-thread) locks.
NSUserDefaults uses NSDistributedLock to ensure that only one process updates 
the persistent defaults at a time, so you could try looking there.
If I'm to look into it under debug, I really do need at least a way to 
reproduce the problem though.