These directories should be owned by root with appropriate protection; in particular, things can fail if the sockets contained in them are not accessable to clients properly. Exactly what the right fix is for this problem isn't immediately obvious. We will open a discussion on the desktop lists to hash through the right solutions. The .X11-unix directory is less problematic, as the X server is (usually) running as root and could (does?) ensure the right properties on the directory. But the .ICE-unix directory can/does often get set incorrectly. This can cause *really* mystic failures at times, for example, when changing a user's uid if you don't know to search the file system for all occurances of files owned by someone and change appropriately.
Created attachment 141 [details] Early discussion on Gnome mailing list about this issue.
*** Bug 297 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I believe Egbert has checked in a patch to make the checking more strict. Are there any other issues that we want to address in this release? If not, please move this bug over to blocking the release notes bugs (#999).
Closing and moving over block release notes as discussed on release wranglers call
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