Created attachment 537520 [details, diff] patch for the package muffin Cinnamon's window manager muffin does not need the package zenity. It is only required via the build system. I worked with Cinnamon/muffin without zenity under Linux From Scratch for about one year. Now I work this way under Gentoo. Kristian Fiskerstrand asked me to file this report together with patches. patch for the ebuild file: muffin-3.6.0.ebuild --- a/muffin-3.6.0.ebuild 2018-05-22 03:39:19.000000000 +0200 +++ b/muffin-3.6.0.ebuild 2018-06-28 11:37:46.040354000 +0200 @@ -39,8 +39,6 @@ x11-libs/libXrender virtual/opengl - gnome-extra/zenity - introspection? ( >=dev-libs/gobject-introspection-0.9.5:= ) xinerama? ( x11-libs/libXinerama ) " @@ -61,6 +59,9 @@ " src_prepare() { + # Remove the dependency on zenity + eapply "${FILESDIR}"/muffin-zenity.patch + eautoreconf gnome2_src_prepare }
Created attachment 537522 [details, diff] patch for muffin-3.6.0.ebuild
Created attachment 537524 [details] emerge --info
muffin checks for zenity because it uses it. src/core/util.c meta_show_dialog function is realized by calling into zenity. That in turn is called in session management code when some legacy windows are encountered that don't report their position or something properly, which is probably not happening often. But more often happens the other use case - when an application isn't reacting to the window close click due to being busy or frozen. Then it's used to ask the "Application is not responding. You may choose to wait a short while for it to continue or force the application to quit entirely." question via zenity. If zenity is not available, an error will be logged and the dialog is not popped up, meaning you can't actually force quit these frozen apps. Thus your claim of "Cinnamon's window manager muffin does not need the package zenity." is incorrect.
Mart Raudsepp (comment #3) is correct. The function in question exists and it is used by other functions. I am sorry about the waste of time. I am quite far away from contributing.
No worries. Maybe in the future they'll use something else for this dialog, but looks like even mutter (from which muffin is forked from) still uses zenity. I suspect they need an outside process for this for some technical reasons, and zenity is just a non-NIH thing for that right now.