[csw-users] Problems with CSWgtk2

[Robert Stampfli]

One of the things I'm encountering more and more often is having
to deal with software on an ancillary basis that I really know
very little about.  I've run into yet another such case today,
and rather than try to understand exactly what is happening, I'm
just going to present what I found here in the hopes that it
might be of use to others, perhaps make sense to someone else
who can expand on it and better explain what happened, and maybe
even allow the developer to present a more bullet-proof package
in the future.

Today, I brought my outdated CSW packages up to date.  Prior to this
update, I had pointed the Solaris Adobe Acrobat Reader (7.08) to
/opt/csw/lib (invoking it thru a script that uses LD_LIBRARY_PATH)
because it apparently is no longer self-contained and now requires
libraries, like gtk2, that are not in the normal search path, but
are in the CSW lib directory -- at least in mine.  This had worked
well up to this point.  After upgrading, the Adobe reader would no
longer start up reliably.  It instead presented several pages of
GTK warnings and then bailed out with some libpix error.  Since one
of the packages updated was CSWgtk2, from 2.8.4 to 2.10.1 (I had
avoided upgrading to 2.10.0 earlier because of similar failures),
I backed out 2.10.1 and went back to 2.8.4, and Adobe was once
again happy.  (Yes, I do keep the old CSW pkgs around for just
this reason.)

I then started investigating why 2.10.1 failed.  To make a long
story short, the problem turned out to be with the two files in
/opt/csw/etc/gtk-2.0.  It seems when the 2.8.4 pkg is installed,
it updates these files in some sophisticated way.  When 2.10.1
is installed, it simply asks:

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The following files are already installed on the system and are being
used by another package:
* /opt/csw/etc/gtk-2.0/gdk-pixbuf.loaders
* /opt/csw/etc/gtk-2.0/gtk.immodules

* - conflict with a file which does not belong to any package.

Do you want to install these conflicting files [y,n,?,q] 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

If you answer 'Y', like I did initially, it overwrites the files
with some default that breaks Adobe, and probably other programs.
By pkgrming 2.10.1, reinstalling 2.8.4 and letting it again
massage these files correctly, and then re-upgrading to 2.10.1
and answering 'N' to the above query, I was able to upgrade to
2.10.1 in a way that makes for an apparently stable system (at
least makes Adobe and everything else I tried happy again).

Perhaps it is obvious I should not have answered 'Y' to the
above, but (1) what happens to those who have never previously
installed 2.8.4 and are putting in 2.10.1 for the first time?
They don't have the benefit of the 2.8.4 updates to these files.
And, (2) isn't 'Y' the default for "pkg-get -f" which many default
to when upgrading?  Also, many of us (myself included) sometimes
just queue up lots of 'Y's and go off to do other things while
pkg-get is rumbling through its updates.

It is my hope that if others are having problems after installing
gtk2-2.10.1, they might benefit from this information.  At any
event, I hope this post will save others from having to fiddle
with this problem in the future.

Rob