Re: File chooser recent-files (was: Re: Guidelines for stable branch changes in GLib/Gtk)

[Sam Thursfield <ssssam gmail com>]

On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 7:27 PM, Federico Mena Quintero <federico gnome org> wrote:

On Sun, 2012-11-11 at 15:24 -0500, Ryan Lortie wrote:

> 3) The file chooser "recent folder" changes that landed in 3.0 and also
> on 2.x.
>
> I consider the last case to be particularly egregious because nothing
> was broken to start with and the changes were highly visible from a UI
> standpoint.  As I understand it, GNOME enters UI freeze at a particular
> point in time and never leaves it (on a given stable release).  We can
> argue that Gtk is not GNOME, of course...

 

 ...

(The file chooser is a bit peculiar; I've wanted to keep it as much in
sync as possible between GTK+ 2.24 and GTK+ 3.x, because Big Important
Apps(tm) still use 2.24.  I didn't want a situation where the main apps
use a shitty file chooser and "only" small/new Gnome utilities use the
improved file chooser.)

Interesting point. A colleague of mine once proposed that we move the file chooser out of the toolkit completely and into a separate process, so that all applications would use the same file chooser, and it would also be easier for users to customise. I realise it would probably be a non-starter, since Gtk+ currently allows embedding and modifying the file chooser dialog, so to be at all compatible we would end up needing GtkPlug/GtkSocket and it would be crazy mess. But I like it in theory
 

In [1] I wrote a detailed reasoning for starting up in recently-used
mode.  I still think that reasoning is correct.  However, you and other
people clearly don't like the resulting behavior.

Still, I've had even other people tell me that they like the new
behavior.

The biggest issue I've had with the feature is that the list of recently used folders in the 'Save As' dialog only displays the name of the folder, not its full path. Which of the 6 folders named 'src' did I want to use again?

Sam