In our project we do not launch Thunar by default on boot. With this, running "thunar-settings" does not bring up the settings dialog, it just dbus-activates "Thunar --daemon". Once Thunar is running, launching thunar-settings a second time works fine then.
Created attachment 3028 git formatted patch With this patch we keep the D-Bus connection open longer, which fixes the issue. While I was at it, I also made thunar-settings exit with nonzero if the call fails.
Partially fixed in git master. commit c1f67c1b39af1c03ac3d31e95a35744670ecf354 Wait for a reply in thunar-settings. If we don't do this the call fails when the thunar service is not running yet... Lame... I guess it would still be better to print an error and to return 1 if it fails.
> I guess it would still be better to print an error and to return 1 if it fails. ... but that's exactly what my patch does? Or am I missing something? Thanks, Martin
Yes, it is. Fixed in master: commit 1a1d3f435bdc692b18f609e59796d596c5d9315c Author: Jannis Pohlmann <jannis@xfce.org> Date: Sat Nov 13 17:59:24 2010 +0100 Print an error if thunar-settings fails (bug #6547).