Meld hangs at startup with error: Failed to register: Timeout was reached
this has been reported previously:
this is truly annoying. yes, i imagine you can fix it by rebooting, logging off, etc.
how to reproduce:
- i'm using Cinnamon DE but i imagine i happens with other DEs.
- open meld comparing two or more files, of which at least one is a big binary blob.
- meld becomes totally unresponsive (also very annoying).
- if you use the kill the app window using the usual GUIs:
- the CPU and memory isn't recovered as meld continues churning in the background.
- if you try to spawn a new meld process, meld fails with "Failed to register: Timeout was reached".
- all your previous open meld instances become unresponsive and you can't recover anything.
i imagine this happens because "Meld uses the standard GTK+ single-instance application handling to maintain a single process, which uses dbus as an implementation detail".
if i may say so, this is ugly as hell. why do we need a single instance? why cant i have 5 meld processes if i spawned 5 times? why do i have to loose all my work in all meld windows if one window hangs? why this brittleness? why am i forced to reboot to open a new meld instance because it wants to talk to the old one?
encore...
if meld can handle comparing binary files in a directory tree, why can't it handle them when singled out in the command line? could it at least just refuse to compare them instead of hanging?