Gst.init() has no async variant. If the plugin registry cache is stale
(e.g. right after a system update), it synchronously rescans every
plugin, spawning gst-plugin-scanner per plugin and probing hardware
for codecs. Since gnome-shell is single-threaded and is the
compositor, that can freeze the whole screen for several seconds,
same as the blocking UPower proxy lookup fixed earlier.
Set GST_REGISTRY_UPDATE=no when a cache already exists so Gst.init()
trusts it and returns immediately, then refresh the cache in a
throwaway subprocess afterward so it doesn't go stale forever.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The Preferences window's availability probe (added to surface missing
GStreamer deps in-UI) reused loadGstreamerModules(), which also checks
for Cogl. Cogl is Mutter's private library — its typelib is only
reachable from inside the actual gnome-shell process (which gets a
private GI search path), never from the separate, plain-GTK4
Preferences process. So the check always failed there with "Requiring
Cogl ... not found" even when live wallpapers were working correctly
in the real shell process, as confirmed by a user report where the
extension's own log showed live wallpaper playback starting cleanly
while Preferences simultaneously claimed GStreamer was missing.
Split into loadGstreamerModules() (Gst+GstApp+Cogl, used only by
liveWallpaper.js in the shell process) and a new lighter
checkGstreamerBaseAvailable() (Gst+GstApp only) for prefs.js, with a
note in the UI that a clean check there isn't a full guarantee since
the private half can't be verified from that process.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019RDqbdjsiisSU7CbQke4g8
Previously, if the Gst/GstApp/Cogl GI typelibs couldn't be loaded (e.g.
gst-plugins-base/good not installed, only the bare gstreamer package),
the only sign was a warning buried in the shell's log — the live
wallpaper page looked fully functional and silently did nothing.
Preferences now probes for the same bindings the running extension
needs and shows a warning row with the exact import error plus
per-distro install commands, and greys out the controls that only
matter once GStreamer is actually available. Extracted the shared
probing logic into lib/gstreamerAvailability.js so extension.js and
prefs.js (separate processes) don't duplicate it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019RDqbdjsiisSU7CbQke4g8
QuintaandClaude Sonnet 5