Preferences menu displaced

[Albert Vilella]

Hi all,

When I open the preferences menu in Evolution, version 2.2.1.1-0ubuntu4, this
appears displaced to the lower right corner of the display (1024x768 screen
resolution), partly out of screen, which makes it difficult to interact with.

This only happens with the Preferences menu: the other windows appear
well-centered or in the upper left corner.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=272967: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=272967

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug. Could you make a screenshot of the issue?

[Albert Vilella (avilella)]

Created an attachment (id=3512)
screenshot of the problem

screenshot of the problem showing the preference menu as it appears

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

there is not menu on this screenshot. Do you speak about the account dialog?

[Albert Vilella (avilella)]

I refer to the window that appears when clicking:

Edit->Preferences (Change Evolution's preferences)

which is a window named "Evolution Preferences" in English ("Configuració de
l'Evolution" in the catalan snapshot).

In the snapshot, the window appears displaced to the lower right: it is not
fully visible, there are parts in the lower right, including the "Close" button,
that won't appear. The user would have to drag the window with the mouse to the
upper left each time it is opened.

[mjukr (mek)]

What additional info is needed? I can confirm this bug. Attempts to move the
Preferences window don't hold; after closing and reopening, window still appears
offscreen.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

No other comment is required, the use of "menu" to describe the dialog was the
reason of the NEEDINFO. That's known upstream as
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=272967

[Jean-Pierre Rupp (xenog)]

Even after moving the preferences window to touch the top gnome panel, it's still too high to be displayed on a 1280x768 resolution display.

[Christer Edwards (christer.edwards)]

I can confirm this as well. I submitted a similar bug here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/129599 . I am using a 1280x800 resolution on a macbook.

[Gert Kulyk (gkulyk)]

I've a proposal-fix for this problem: The problem is, that the mail-account-configuration-dialog is too tall, which causes a resize of the complete preferences-dialog. When singeling out the mail-notification-stuff to a seperate tab, the height should be ok for configurations 1024x768 and higher (not sure about lower resolutions).

The file where the dialog is described is mail-config.glade, to be found in mail/ directory in the source tree or in /usr/share/evolution/VERSION/glade.

I've tested only 2.12 version. When using gutsy, and _only_ then, rename the /usr/share/evolution/2.12/glade/mail-config.glade file to something like /usr/share/evolution/2.12/glade/mail-config.glade.orig and copy the attached file as mail-config.glade to your /usr/share/evolution/2.12/glade directory to test it. Because I did not alter the strings, translations should be ok.

If you accept such a fix, I'll try to make a patch for the source-package.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for the work on that. Could you attach a patch and explain how it fixes the issue rather than a new glade description?

[Gert Kulyk (gkulyk)]

The changes I made to the dialog are as following:

In the "General" tab of the "Mail Preferences" dialog I've removed the "New Mail Notification" category, which went to a single tab with the same name (at the moment this is the last tab, maybe this is not the best placement, but I did not care about that, because this is an option not that important for me). Furthermore I made the tabs scrollable, to prevent allocating more space in the width than the widest dialog is using.

Maybe the best solution would be, to provide screenshots - then you can see what I mean.

[Gert Kulyk (gkulyk)]

Update: I've been talking to upstream. They are willing to accept the first hunk of my patch (to make the tabs for mail-preferences dialog scrollable, avoiding allocation of horizontal space that exceeds the width of the widest dialog), the second one (moving New Mail Notification in a seperate tab) will be obsoleted, soon. They are planning to put the mail-notification stuff in the preferences-dialog for the according plugin. Anyway, the problem with the too tall mail-preferences dialog seems to get solved in 2.14 :-) (Maybe there's a chance to backport this for 2.12?).

Concerning the "displacement": The window is not centered, because a "hack" for bonobo is allocating space on startup for the dialog (needed due to bonobo-restrictions), which is too small for the largest dialog (mail preferences, general tab). If you are observing the startup of the dialog, you'll see that for a rather short time you have a perfectly centered dialog, which will be displaced after all dialogs are loaded. This hopefulle will vanish, when upstream is killing the bonobo/bonoboui stuff.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

That's not likely to be changed for gutsy now, the new version is close and we are working on important bugs which this one is not

[Gert Kulyk (gkulyk)]

I know, I did not think about backporting these changes for gutsy, but about backporting this to the upstream-stable branch, e.g. for a 2.12.3 release. But it's finally getting (at least partly) fixed upstream, which is good news.

[Anatoliy Kounitskiy (bgtroll)]

I would like to update this bug. In the last Evolution version in Jaunty - 2.26.0-0ubuntu2. The bug still persists.
I'm using 1280x800 resolution - and when I start the wizard, or open the options window I can not see the whole window.
(you can see on the screenshot)

[Tim Schofield (tim-scoffer)]

I can confirm this in jaunty evolution 2.26.1-0ubuntu1

I am using a screen resolution of 1280x768 I can just see the top of the close button and I cannot resize this window to a smaller size.

[Gert Kulyk (gkulyk)]

@ Tim Schofield

This time it is not evolutions fault. It is related to the evolution-indicatior plugin. When you disable it and start the preferences dialog you'll see that at least for your resolution everything should be ok.

[Tim Schofield (tim-scoffer)]

Gert

OK confirmed my preferences dialog size is now fixed with evolution-inidicator plugin disabled. Just found bug #331167 has already been opened for this.

Thanks

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The bug has been fixed upstream now