Re: [Geary] Geary title bar on Ubuntu

[Adam Dingle <adam medovina org>]

On Tue, Oct 4, 2016 at 4:45 PM, Michael Gratton <mike vee net> wrote:

Hey Adam,

On Tue, Oct 4, 2016 at 4:41 AM, Adam Dingle <adam medovina org> wrote:

On the upcoming Ubuntu release 16.10 (Yakkety), both Geary 0.11.2 (which is available from the Ubuntu repo) and Geary master display a single unified title bar that includes the system close/maximize/minimize buttons as well as all of Geary's icons.

Hmm, has Ubuntu made some changes that have caused this that you know of? While the custom Gear menu and special cases for Unity were pulled out of master, they were deliberately left intact in the 0.11 branch so the UX for LTS users didn't change.

I'm not very aware of what changes Ubuntu might have made.  As usual, 16.10 contains a newer version of GTK (3.20) than its predecessors, which could have some effect of course.

 This is problematic for 2 reasons:

1. It looks inconsistent with the rest of the Ubuntu desktop, where other applica tions have a title bar that includes only the application name and close/maximize/minimize buttons; application-specific icons appear in a separate bar below that.

Does this also happen with other GNOME/GTK+ apps that use a GtkHeaderBar?

As an example, gedit also uses a GtkHeaderBar.  If I build gedit from GNOME master on Ubuntu 16.10, then I see the same issues as in Geary: (a) there is a single bar with gedit's own menus/icons rather than a separate title bar as in all other apps on the Ubuntu desktop; (b) gedit's menus aren't accessible if I enable menus in title bars.

Ubuntu 16.10 ships with gedit 3.22.0, which is reasonably close to master.  The shipping gedit looks and works fine because Ubuntu patches it.

2. If I set Ubuntu's setting "Show the menus for a window" to "In the window's title bar", then the Geary menu is inaccessible.

Does that happen even after restarting Geary/X11?

Yes.

I'd expect Unity to do the right thing and set GSettings' gtk-shell-shows-app-menu prop to false, in which case GTK should then show the app menu, but that also depends on what you have set for the gtk-decoration-layout prop.

What values does Geary have set for those two props for you? (The GTK Inspector is the easiest way to find out).

I fired up the GTK Inspector, but was unable to find these properties on any of these objects:

- GearyApplication

- GearyApplciation's GMenu

- Geary's MainWindow

- the MainWindow's MainToolbar

Should I be looking somewhere else?

Mike, should I file a Bugzilla bug about this, which would mean that you and/or other Geary contributors feel at least somewhat responsible for fixing this?  Or should I instead file this at Ubuntu's Launchpad, which would mean this should be considere d an Ubuntu integration issue?

If Ubuntu is already patching other GTK applications that use a HeaderBar, then I'd say the former. If not, then maybe we should reintroduce the Unity-specific behaviour to workaround their UX.

As I mentioned Ubuntu is patching other GTK applications (like gedit) that use a HeaderBar.  So should I file a Bugzilla bug as you suggested ("the former"), or will you?

Finally, it would be very nice for me (and many other Ubuntu users) if I could build Geary from master and have it just work on Ubuntu, as has always been the case in the past.  So I'd like to put in a vote for whatever makes that possible, even if it means having Unity-specific workarounds in Geary master.  thanks -

adam