Re: Unexpected behaviour with multiple instances of meld

[Peter Williams <pwil3058 gmail com>]

On 13/06/15 09:25, Kai Willadsen wrote:
> On 8 June 2015 at 09:34, Peter Williams <pwil3058 gmail com> wrote:
> > 1. if I launch a new instance of meld while I have a running copy
> > minimised/iconified, the minimised instance gets raised.
> >
> > 2. if the original instance was on a different workspace to the one I was
> > working on I get shifted to that workspace (which can be a little
> > disorientating).
>
> So these first two are definitely not intended behaviour. I think
> we're just getting our window activation wrong in the instance
> lifecycle, and so raising the primary instance when we mean to be
> raising the secondary. This may already be fixed in a branch... I'll
> have to check.

I just use the version of meld that my distribution (Korora 21) provides 
but I can check out sources and test other versions if you'd like me to?

> Either way, could you please file a bug?

OK. I was reluctant to do that without discussing it first.

> > 3. if I tick the "visible on all workspaces" option in an instances window
> > management options (in an attempt to cope with issue 2 above) it doesn't
> > play nicely e.g. it only shows up on another workspace if it was maximised
> > when I changed workspaces.  Other programs do not exhibit this behaviour
> > including ones I have written myself that have nothing special in their
> > implementation to achieve this.
>
> This is just weird. I'm sorry, but I don't have any guidance here. It
> may be an odd interaction between GtkApplication and your window
> manager? but we certainly don't do anything strange in Meld itself.

It could be.  I don't use GtkApplication for my GUIs.  I just use a 
GtkWindow instance (launched from a Python script) for my main window.

I don't know what other applications use but most of them (Geany, 
Firefox, Thunderbird, regexxer, gnometerminal, etc) don't exhibit this 
behaviour.  However, I've just done some testing with Gnome terminal 
(which I'd never tried this with before) and it exhibits the same 
behaviour as meld which may help track down the problem.

But there's a chance that it's just a side effect of the above bug and 
that it will go away when that's fixed.

> > I realize that other users probably use meld in different ways to me and
> > that this coupling between instance probably suits their work practices but
> > I was wondering if it would be possible to have an option that turns it off
> > to allow launching of independent instances?
>
> Not really, no. We're using GtkApplication for instance handling, and
> adding anything else is just way too complicated. However, as far as
> I'm concerned the problems you've described are just straight-up bugs
> and we don't need to disable single-instance stuff to fix them.
>
> cheers,
> Kai

Thanks for your response
Peter
PS I'm a great fan of meld.