Gnome 2.12 Coming to Debian

Debian Sid automatically upgrades Gnome as they become available, and I guess all the programs are supposed to be able to migrate their configurations from older versions. Regardless, I slowly accrued odd little errors over time (like panel complaining another was already running, or panels complaining of crashes on logout).

Last week or so, I finally bit the bullet, and blew away all the configuration files I could find and reinitialized a fresh session with Gnome 2.10. After an hour or so of trying to remember all the buttons and little applets I had, I was back up and running pretty cleanly.

Only a few days after putting in that work, Gnome 2.12 has started filtering into Debian Sid, and problems are cropping up again. As I worked and tuned, somehow I've managed to make the Gnome startup splash screen hang waiting for something to start, but I don't know what. I sort of remember encountering this a long time ago in very old versions of Gnome, but I didn't note what caused it and how I fixed it.

I've read and experienced that ESD can be problematic, so maybe I'll go experimenting around there. I've recently done some work to try to get ESD to talk directly to ALSA, but that had initially made things better for blocking sound applications, not worse. Maybe when the rest of Gnome 2.12 gets into Debian, I'll have to blow away my configurations again.