[Bug 31402] gnome-session properties hangs, when writing to files it doesn't have permisions to modify

[Andrzej Mendel]

Public bug report changed:
https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/31402

Comment:
This is a bit more complicated, gnome-session-properties is quite broken currently and I'll try to explain it now.
The first thing is that when gnome-session-properties can't delete appropriate .desktop file it hangs and needs to be killed by hand. This is very bad, GUI should pop a nice message up and let the user carry on as. That's what I ment when I filled this bug.

Let's suppose it does work this way. Unfortunately Joe Average still
won't be able to stop programs declared in /usr/share/autostart from
launching at login. There should be some way to disable them and make
gnome-session ignore them. We can't exept each and every e.g. KDE
package maintaner will remember to declare "OnlyShowIn=KDE;" and vice
versa. That was the second problem

I have also found out that gnome-session-properties doesn't actually write stuff to ~/.local/share/autostart/*.desktop as it should do when user adds programs to his startup. It does show on startup programs list, but dissapears after logout and subsequent login. Trying to delete it hangs g-s-p and strace gives following message:
unlink("/home/kelner/.local/share/autostart/ps.desktop") = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

so there are 3 related, but separate bugs:
I: gnome-session-properties hangs when it fails to delete .desktop file
II: can't disable startup programs listed in /usr/share/autostart
III: gnome-session doesn't create .desktop files for user-defined startup apps.
II and III both lead to I, but are different issues and IMHO should be treated as such.
Hope this clarified thing a bit. Guess it confused you a lot more ;)