Basically, we recently[1] removed XSMP from gnome-session because it's
been disabled for a while. Mutter also[2] removed its XSMP integration
shortly after.
However, it turns out that gnome-session's builtin service manager was
relying on Mutter's XSMP integration to know when gnome-shell is done
starting up. No more XSMP = no more notification = gnome-session decides
that gnome-shell is dead even though it's not = fail whale
This is a temporary measure. GDM will soon switch[3] to an architecture
that will allow us to completely drop gnome-session's builtin service
manager, and this workaround will go away