Recent documents list should behave as a FIFO structure

[rpr nospam]

On Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS with MATE 1.16 installed (also on Ubuntu MATE 17.04 with MATE 1.18) user can enable the advanced menu on the Panel and also the recent documents plugin in the Menu preferences.

After that the Menu displays the "Recent documents" list with at most 10 documents opened through Caja, LibreOffice and other compatible apps.

One would expect that the Recent documents list behaves as a FIFO (first in, first out) structure: the most recently opened document goes on top of the list and pushes the previous list members downwards, and if the list was already full, the last member is dropped from the list.

Such behaviour I can see for example in Windows Explorer of MS Windows 10 which offers the "Quick access" with the Recent files.

Unfortunately, the recent documents plugin uses another odd algorithm as follows:

(1) Suppose you have 12 documents named test1.txt, test2.txt ... test12.txt. You can create them quickly with the following command in bash:
  for i in {1..12}; do touch "test$i.txt"; done
Also, suppose the Recent documents list is empty (if it is not, click the Clear button at the bottom of the list).

(2) In Caja open test1.txt, test2.txt ... test12.txt in that order. With each file opened the Recent documents list is populated with the most recent file on top of the list and after the last file opened the list contains the following 10 files:

test12.txt
test11.txt
...
test3.txt

(3) Now, open test1.txt again in Caja. After that I would expect that test1.txt gets on top of the Recent documents list but it does not - the list does not change. The same happens if you open any of the files that you already opened.

I'd say that such behaviour does not make any sense and should be changed to a simple FIFO structure.

[Norbert (nrbrtx)]

Can you reproduce this bug with newer version of Ubuntu MATE?

[rpr nospam (rpr-nospam)]

Norbert, I can also reproduce this bug in Ubuntu MATE 20.04 LTS.