Themes with ampersands do not show up in appearance preferences

[Koivisto]

Binary package hint: gnome-control-center

Themes with ampersands (the & sign) do not show up in the Theme tab of Appearance Preferences.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Right click your desktop, click on Change Desktop Background.
2. Go to the Theme tab.
3. Modify a theme so you can save it.
4. Save it with a name like "Test&Theme" (without quotes).
5. There's no new entry in the list of themes, but the file and folder were created in the ~/.themes/ directory.

I also closed and re-opened the Appearance Preferences dialog, to make sure it didn't need to be restarted, I copied the folder and renamed both the folder and file to "Test" (without quotes) and it showed up in the theme list when I re-opened the Appearance Preferences dialog.
After this I attempted to create a new theme without ampersands, and everything worked as expected; the theme showed up in the list after entering a name and no description and clicking Save.

Update:
If you have another theme in your ~/.themes/ directory with a name that alphabetically comes before your new theme, your new theme with the ampersand in it will take on that themes name, and you will have two entries with the same name.

For example:
1. You only have the theme ABC in your themes directory, and save a theme with the name B&C.
2. You now have two themes named ABC.

This does not happen if the only theme before it also has & in the name, then neither theme shows up.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Feb 24 13:50:53 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/gnome-appearance-properties
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
Package: gnome-control-center 1:2.28.1-0ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-19.56-generic
SourcePackage: gnome-control-center
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-19-generic x86_64

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report. The issue is an upstream one and it would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug the to the people writting the software (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME)

Confirming on lucid

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Could you try if that's still an issue with GNOME3 in Oneiric?

[Koivisto (koivisto)]

I can confirm this is still an issue using today's daily build of Oneiric, however this issue is still not with Ubuntu rather it is with a GNOME tool.

Steps I took beforehand:
I downloaded the current daily build of oneiric-desktop-amd64.
Installed Oneiric on a new virtual machine in VirtualBox.
Updated it fully.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Go to /usr/share/themes/ and copy a theme folder to a name with an ampersand (I used Radiance which I named Ray&Dance).
2. Open the .desktop file (Radiance.desktop in my case) and edit all the occurrences of the name to include the ampersand.
3. Install gnome-tweak-tool (sudo apt-get gnome-tweak-tool).
4. Select "Theme" from the listbox.
5. Click the dropdown menu for either "Window theme" or "GTK+ theme".
6. Notice there is a duplicate of another theme in the list rather than your new theme.

So, rather than being a bug in Oneiric where the themes I created in /usr/share/themes/ would not even show up in the Appearance menu (like a lot of the other themes that come with GNOME 3 by default); this is a bug in the gnome-tweak-tool which - I believe - doesn't even come with Oneiric at the moment.

Also it is worth noting again that I am using a daily build - which is quite buggy. However, due to the fact that the bug acts just like before and that the bug exists in a GNOME tool rather than in Ubuntu I do not believe a bug in the daily build to be the cause.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the un-escaped "&" in the xml seems buggy, not really a bug in gnome-control-center but rather in what write it un-escaped

[Koivisto (koivisto)]

Actually, the bug still exists whether you escape the ampersand or not.

[Koivisto (koivisto)]

I would like to add that this is not a bug in Ubuntu so it is indeed invalid, I will instead make a new bug report in GNOME's bugzilla.