evince not indexed / launchable from unity dash

[Chad A Davis]

Binary package hint: evince

The Unity dash doesn't seem to index evince. Invoking the dash and searching for 'evince' or 'viewer' or 'pdf' or 'document viewer' doesn't show evince in the list of resulting applications. For other applications in general, either the executable name or the friendly name are both sufficient for finding an application (e.g. either 'palimsest' or 'disk utility' find the same application).
As a workaround, you can start evince from a command line, or launch it indirectly by opening a PDF from e.g. nautilus and then right click the icon in the launcher and selecting 'Keep in launcher' once it's running.

This is:
unity 3.8.10-0ubuntu2
evince 2.32.0-0ubuntu12

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: evince 2.32.0-0ubuntu12
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic 2.6.38.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-8-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia wl
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Apr 22 12:28:22 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Beta amd64+mac (20110413)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US:en
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature_: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic 2.6.38.2
SourcePackage: evince
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Marcel Stimberg (marcelstimberg)]

Evince was hidden from the menu before, and unity seems to honor the "NoDisplay=True" setting. It has been debated upstream (see the linked bug report) whether this is reasonable for the Gnome Shell. I'm marking it as "Opinion" for now because it is a rather fundamental question, whether this is really be a bug or not -- maybe someone from the Ubuntu desktop team can comment on what the consensus is on this... A similar bug report has been closed as invalid a long time ago (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evince/+bug/123397), but maybe we should think about it again for unity because I do not see any disadvantage in being able to start evince from the dash (in contrast to classic Gnome where it adds clutter to the menu).
The question is: What is the usecase for opening evince directly? Correct me if I'm wrong but the only one I'm seeing is using the "recent documents" entry in the file menu -- in contrast to many other applications that you can start directly, you can't for example create a new document in evince. With all the zeitgeist goodness this should not be needed anymore because you can access the recent documents directly from the dash.

BTW: All this applies to other applications as well, most notably the shotwell image viewer and eog.

[Marcel Stimberg (marcelstimberg)]

Oh and FWIW: According to the upstream bug, Fedora removed the NoDisplay=True for evince.

[Chad A Davis (chadadavis)]

I agree in that case that this is an opinion. And the use case in question is exactly the one you mentioned: accessing the recent file list. That this can be accomplished in one preferred manner, does not mean that the other ways need to be hidden, though. This is inconsistent with other applications: the recent files menu does not show me recent web pages; for that I need to open the browser, and I need to open the correct browser and not a different browser. Because of this, many users associate the document/page/image that they see with the application used to view it. When I want to re-edit a recent word processing document, I first open Open/Libre-Office; when I want to listen to a song again, I start by opening Banshee/Rhythmbox, not by checking the recent files in the dash.

It does make sense, when browsing a menu, that small utilities be hidden, for the sake of saving space. However, the new design of the Unity dash eliminates the need to make exceptions in order to save space. In Maverick I used Gnome Do or Kupfer to launch applications because of the nice experience that it provided, which we now have in Unity. Gnome Do and Kupfer index Evince, because they don't need to hide it in order to not be overwhelming.

The rhetorical question: why should we permit something that we haven't foreseen is contrary to what makes the Unix approach flexible, which is that having things behave consistently not only allows users to define their own work habit, but also allows them to come up with workflows that go beyond what developers originally had in mind. It makes for a very inconsistent user experience to have these exceptions. Of course, they will be retained for the classic desktop, but do we really need to save so much space in unity, when we have the nice search facility?

A final use case to demonstrate the inconsistency: delete Firefox from the launcher and try to add it back: open the dash, search for "firefox" or "browser" and drag the application icon and drop it on the launcher. Done. Now delete the "Home folder" from the launcher and try to add it back: search for "home" or "folder" or even "nautilus", no results. Even if you find the *.desktop file and drag it to the launcher, it is rejected. I think this inconsistent user experience will make unity more unpredictable than it needs to be and may negatively impact adoption of unity.

[Matt Giuca (mgiuca)]

This seems to be a duplicate of bug #743383, but I'm not sure if I should mark it so because there is a nice discussion in here.

[Marcel Stimberg (marcelstimberg)]

Hi Matt,
as the other bug is marked as "Won't fix" I think it won't hurt to mark it as a duplicate of this bug here -- even though the other one has been reported earlier.

[Eric Appleman (erappleman)]

I have a constant and present need to open Evince manually like I would otherwise with Adobe Reader.

You guys are putting the ideas of developers before the needs of users by removing choice.

[Eric Appleman (erappleman)]

btw, this is even more of a problem in classic mode when there are no "recent docs" to click on

[Dmitry Shachnev (mitya57)]

This bug was fixed in package evince - 3.1.2-0ubuntu1

---------------
evince (3.1.2-0ubuntu1) oneiric; urgency=low

  * New upstream version
  * debian/patches/10_remove_nodisplay.patch:
    - Follow Fedora's example and show "Document Viewer" in Unity or
      Gnome Shell search
  * debian/watch:
    - Point to unstable .bz2
 -- Jeremy Bicha <email address hidden> Tue, 28 Jun 2011 08:24:25 -0400