Menus for parent window are still present when dialog is focused

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement]

Binary package hint: unity

When a modal dialog is shown the user must not be able to interact with the menu of the main window, this breaks the workflow of the application.

Test Case:
- Launch gedit
- Enter some text in the text area
- Close gedit
    -> The "Save changes ..." dialog is displayed
- In the global menu select "Search / Find..."
    -> This opens the search dialog but you can't interact with it because a modal dialog is opened.

The menu should be disabled in this situation to prevent this kind of action.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: unity 3.2.12-0ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.37-12.26-generic 2.6.37
Uname: Linux 2.6.37-12-generic i686
Architecture: i386
CompizPlugins: No value set for `/apps/compiz-1/general/allscreens/options/active_plugins'
CompositorRunning: compiz
DRM.card0.LVDS.1:
 status: connected
 enabled: enabled
 dpms: Off
 modes: 1280x800
 edid-base64: AP///////wAGEF6cAAAAAAkQAQOAHRN4CmUhn1hVhyopUFQAAAABAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBvBsAoFAgFzAwIDYAHrIQAAAYAAAAAQAGECAAAAAAAAAAAAogAAAA/gBOMTMzSTEtTDAxCiAgAAAA/ABDb2xvciBMQ0QKICAgAGE=
DRM.card0.VGA.1:
 status: connected
 enabled: enabled
 dpms: On
 modes: 1600x1200 1280x1024 1280x1024 1152x864 1024x768 1024x768 800x600 800x600 640x480 640x480 720x400
 edid-base64: AP///////wAQrAegTDhQMC8PAQMOKR947mOQo1dLmyURUFSlSwCBgKlAcU8BAQEBAQEBAQEBSD9AMGKwMkBAwBMAbxMRAAAeAAAA/wBDMDg4MTVCSTBQOEwgAAAA/ABERUxMIDIwMDFGUAogAAAA/QA4TB9QEAAKICAgICAgAJA=
Date: Thu Jan 20 23:37:47 2011
DistUpgraded: Yes, recently upgraded Log time: 2009-11-14 16:29:16.249784
DistroCodename: natty
DistroVariant: ubuntu
DkmsStatus:
 vboxhost, 4.0.2, 2.6.37-12-generic, i686: installed
 virtualbox-ose, 3.2.12, 2.6.37-12-generic, i686: installed (WARNING! Diff between built and installed module!) (WARNING! Diff between built and installed module!) (WARNING! Diff between built and installed module!)
 virtualbox-ose, 3.2.12, 2.6.37-11-generic, i686: installed (WARNING! Diff between built and installed module!) (WARNING! Diff between built and installed module!) (WARNING! Diff between built and installed module!)
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
GraphicsCard:
 Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device [1043:14e2]
   Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device [1043:14e2]
MachineType: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. U3SG
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US:en
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcKernelCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-12-generic root=UUID=75f23f17-3ace-4485-af57-a7318eb6c2ff ro vt.handoff=7 quiet splash
ProcVersionSignature_: Ubuntu 2.6.37-12.26-generic 2.6.37
Renderer: Hardware acceleration
SourcePackage: unity
UnitySupportTest:

dmi.bios.date: 01/28/2008
dmi.bios.vendor: American Megatrends Inc.
dmi.bios.version: 305
dmi.board.asset.tag: ATN12345678901234567
dmi.board.name: U3SG
dmi.board.vendor: ASUSTeK Computer Inc.
dmi.board.version: 1.0
dmi.chassis.asset.tag: ATN12345678901234567
dmi.chassis.type: 10
dmi.chassis.vendor: ASUSTeK Computer Inc.
dmi.chassis.version: 1.0
dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnAmericanMegatrendsInc.:bvr305:bd01/28/2008:svnASUSTeKComputerInc.:pnU3SG:pvr1.0:rvnASUSTeKComputerInc.:rnU3SG:rvr1.0:cvnASUSTeKComputerInc.:ct10:cvr1.0:
dmi.product.name: U3SG
dmi.product.version: 1.0
dmi.sys.vendor: ASUSTeK Computer Inc.
version.libdrm2: libdrm2 2.4.22-2ubuntu1
version.libgl1-mesa-glx: libgl1-mesa-glx 7.9+repack-1ubuntu6
version.xserver-xorg: xserver-xorg 1:7.5+6ubuntu8
version.xserver-xorg-video-ati: xserver-xorg-video-ati N/A
version.xserver-xorg-video-intel: xserver-xorg-video-intel 2:2.13.901-2ubuntu2
version.xserver-xorg-video-nouveau: xserver-xorg-video-nouveau N/A

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

Hi MPT - this one is squarely in your territory. My gut would be that
the default behaviour should be as described, though the app should be
able to deliberately overrule that and present a menu regardless (at
which point problems are bugs in the app, not bugs in the system).

Mark

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Thanks Omer.

There's nothing new that needs specifying here. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MenuBar> already says that it should be the menus for the active window that are shown in the menu bar. It does not say the menus for any other window should be.

In future, dialogs without menus should be able to use the menus of the parent window as the basis for their fallback menus <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MenuBar#Version%202>, but the current behavior is not a step towards that, it's just a bug.

[Alex Launi (alexlauni)]

How does indicator-applet behave in this same case? Do menus remain for modal dialogs?

[Florian Boucault (fboucault)]

This issue does not affect Unity 2D. Menus of parent window are not shown when a modal dialog is focused.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

This is still an issue with Unity dialogs.

[Neil J. Patel (njpatel)]

This does not happen on all windows, but confirmed with GEdit. The funny thing is that we're not doing anything special in Unity, the panel service is reporting that appmenu is asking us to display the full menu for the dialog window....adding indicator-appmenu to the affects list.

[Marco Trevisan (Treviño) (3v1n0)]

Confirming what njpatel says, however indicator-appmenu really when a menus-less dialog is mapped, quickly notifies two events for each menu item: entry-removed and entry-added. However, since they're quite immediate, the UI (unity/unity-2d) doesn't take care of them since they're too near (and the panel-service sends events limiting them with a timeout).

An easy way to see that is to add some g_debug code into entry_added and entry_removed in panel-service.c, then run the service in your terminal and open the menu Terminal -> Set Title... You'll notice what I'm telling.

So indicator-appmenu basically seems to do the wrong thing by first removing the indicators and then re-adding them all.

[Olli Ries (ories)]

confirmed on 12.04 b2 - Charles let's tackle that in 12.10

[Adrien Cunin (adri2000)]

This is a real problem : it causes easily reproducible crashes in FileZilla. The application doesn't expect the user to use the main menu when a modal dialog is open.

[enz (markus-enzenberger)]

I would even say that this bug can crash every application. If the application programmer uses a modal dialog, she explicitely expects that no other events will be handled while the dialog is running. The fact that the main window menu can still trigger event handlers is a serious bug and will cause undefined behavior in most applications.

I am not against Unity, but the fact that serious bugs like this have existed for many months now is very discouraging (another one is that the enabled/disabled status of menu items in Qt applications is not properly updated in the global menu bar).

Please fix these bugs at least in the coming stable Ubuntu release.

[Andrea Cimitan (cimi)]

Olli, SRU?

[Ted Gould (ted)]

This bug can be serious for some applications, and it is a bug. But fixing it would be relatively invasive for this late in the cycle. So, I think we're going to have to put it on the backlog for 12.10. Sad to do that, but I think that's where we are right now.

[Ted Gould (ted)]

It is, by the way, only an indicator-appmenu bug. Marking it as such.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

and it is still a bug in Ubuntu. reassign to the right package instead of marking as Invalid.