Mysterious, unlabeled icons on disk volumes

[Andrew]

Just one of the fourteen disk volumes on my machine is displayed with a star and a triangle in the lower-right corner (screenshot attached). These icons are unlabeled, do not have hover text, are not self-explanatory, and do not appear to respond to left or right mouse clicks. Furthermore, there is no sign of a Help menu within the Disks window or application menu. I have no idea what these icons mean.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
Package: gnome-disk-utility 3.6.1-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-26.42-generic 3.5.7.6
Uname: Linux 3.5.0-26-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia zfs zcommon znvpair zavl zunicode
ApportVersion: 2.6.1-0ubuntu10
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat Apr 6 08:46:11 2013
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/gnome-disks
InstallationDate: Installed on 2012-09-29 (188 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" - Beta amd64 (20120926)
MarkForUpload: True
SourcePackage: gnome-disk-utility
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Stéphane Gourichon (stephane-gourichon-lpad)]

Also suffering this UI bug of sort, also on Ubuntu 12.10.

On my machine, four of the eight partitions are displayed with a star.

The right-pointer triangle appears when the partition is mounted, so it's probably meant as a "media play" metaphor.

The star usually means "new" (irrelevant here), or "preferred" (also irrelevant here). It's not correlated with the filesystem type of the partition.

It's most probably a feature, but certainly fails most reasonable human interface guidelines.

For example, Gnome guidelines about tool bars ( https://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/3.0/toolbars-labels-tooltips.html.en ) mention:

> Every control that appears on your toolbar should have a tooltip, whether or not that control has an associated text label. The tooltip should be a concise description of the control, but should provide more information than its text label where possible. For example, Open an existing document, or Undo last operation.

About icons ( https://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/stable/icons.html.en ):

> Icons are a graphical metaphor presenting a visual image that the user associates with a particular object, state or operation. When a user sees a good icon they are immediately reminded of the item it represents, whether that be an application in the panel menu or the "right aligned" state in a word processor toolbar.

These star and triangle icons in gnome-disks fail at these sentences.

Regards,

[skierpage (skierpage)]

This problem remains in Ubuntu 14.04.

Pressing F1 in the Disks window now brings up some help (yay!), but GNOME Help » Hardware » Disks & storage » "Manage volumes and partitions" is light on details and says nothing about these icon badges.

Besides giving these badges a tooltip, the panel underneath showing partition details (e.g. Size, Device, Partition Type, Contents) should also show the star and play triangle icons, each followed by the textual information that the icon is supposed to convey.

My details:

Package: gnome-disk-utility 3.10.0-1ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.13.0-29.53-generic 3.13.11.2
Uname: Linux 3.13.0-29-generic x86_64
CurrentDesktop: Unity

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue you are reporting is an upstream one and it would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug to the developers of the software by following the instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME. If you have done so, please tell us the number of the upstream bug (or the link), so we can add a bugwatch that will inform us about its status. Thanks in advance.