Xfce Forum

Steve Graham

Member

Registered: 2013-09-05

Posts: 2

[Solved] Thunar - "Failed to set metadata" - no emblems

I run Thunar (my favourite file manager) in a non-XFCE environment, with openbox; Debian Unstable distribution. I've just upgraded Thunar to version 1.6.3 from the Debian repository. (I think the previous Thunar was 1.2.3).

I've lost the "emblems" on files, and if I try to set one via the file properties dialog, Thunar says:
(thunar:2997): thunar-WARNING **: Failed to set metadata: Setting attribute metadata::emblems not supported

I know that in the previous version, metadata was stored in ~/.cache/Thunar/metadata.tdb and this file does still exist and is accessible (and TDB tools can parse it).

Before I go poking through the source code, can anyone point me to what has changed and what might be wrong?

Steve Graham

Member

Registered: 2013-09-05

Posts: 2

Re: [Solved] Thunar - "Failed to set metadata" - no emblems

OK, I understand what was happening (kind of).

I have no GVFS features on this system. I fundamentally disagree with the whole GIO/GVFS concept, because I think that desktop applications have no business trying to manage volumes. One of the basic Unix concepts was that applications see a single, uniform file heirarchy, managed by the operating system.

So I have GIO_USE_VFS=local which stops the gio libs trying to do volume management, and apps using the libs seemed to be quite happy. However, Thunar calls g_file_set_attributes_finish to set the metadata and this does fail in the "GIO_USE_VFS=local" case.

If I enable all the GVFS functionality, (which runs up 5 additional processes), g_file_set_attributes_finish executes correctly and writes the metadata into ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/root and Thunar shows the emblem on the icon.

Cadeeb

Member

Registered: 2016-12-25

Posts: 1

Re: [Solved] Thunar - "Failed to set metadata" - no emblems

Hi all,

I had the same symptoms but it was possibly another issue / root cause. I preferred the solution from
https://forum.ubuntu-fr.org/viewtopic.php?id=1996864
(in french)

that is:
the 'home' files from ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata were not owned by me. To resolve:

cd ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata
ls -lA home*
# You should see here that 'root' (or anyone else you) is owner
# To resolve:
chown `whoami` home
chgrp `whoami` home
chown `whoami` home*.log
chgrp `whoami` home*.log
ls -lA home*
# To check it's done...