Gnome desktop icons are shifted when the file is edited

[Jarmo Ilonen]

Binary package hint: nautilus

I noticed this (minor but annoying) bug after upgrading to feisty around herd2. I am using defaultish gnome desktop and the current version of nautilus is 2.17.90-0ubuntu1.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Create a text-file to desktop (~/Desktop), for example foo.txt
2. Move the file's icon to somewhere else from its default place
3. Double-click the icon so it gets opened (in gedit here)
4. Write something and save
5. The icon is moved to upper left corner, while it should stay where it was (and did so in edgy).

Creating a new user with empty $HOME did not help, so I assume it is not caused by any local settings. However, the bug does not seem to affect all kinds of files, for example icons of images stay in the same place when edited.

I tried to find if the bug has been reported before but did not find anything. Closest match I found was http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=330298 and it seems like there was some patch applied to nautilus post-edgy; maybe it's related to this. Anyway, this bug is quite annoying as I have become used to storing few frequently edited text files in the desktop, and now they all want to gather round in the left upper corner.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug. I've commented on the upstream bug you pointed with your description

[Vaida Bogdan (vaidab)]

Same problem here. On 7.10

[Olek Wojnar (olekw)]

I have also noticed this since upgrading to Feisty. And this bug continues to be present in Gutsy.

[xtknight (xt-knight)]

Seems like there is a needless refresh when the number of files in the directory does not change. Additionally when there does need to be a refresh the positions shouldn't be changing. A spurious refresh also causes emblems to disappear.

[Pablo Castellazzi (pcastellazzi)]

+1 Ubuntu Gutsy 7.1 nautilus 1:2.20.0-0ubuntu7

[Dave Vree (hdave)]

Same problem here on Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10

[Jani Alinikula (janialinikula)]

I can confirm this too on Gutsy (Nautilus 2.20.0). Nautilus is in the spatial mode and "keep aligned" is off.

[Kees Cook (kees)]

Confirmed on Hardy as well. This is likely a result of the inotify tracking of a save-via-new-file-and-rename. For example, here is what gnumeric does when saving:

access("/home/kees/Desktop/test.gnumeric", W_OK) = 0
open("/home/kees/Desktop/.gsf-save-68H34T", O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL, 0600) = 14
rename("/home/kees/Desktop/.gsf-save-68H34T", "/home/kees/Desktop/test.gnumeric") = 0

The problem is that the desktop position of the new file is used, instead of the position of the resulting filename.

[Jarmo Ilonen (trewas)]

This seems to be fixed now in hardy (nautilus 2.22.1-0ubuntu1), icons stay in the same place when the file is saved (tested with gnumeric and gedit).

[Kees Cook (kees)]

Fix confirmed on my end too. Nice!