apps that are "kept in dock" don't show a running indicator light under them when they are running

[Allen Lowe]

this happens most of the time I believe

[Robert Dyer (psybers)]

Works fine for me.

[Allen Lowe (lallenlowe)]

ok, this is just getting weirder, some apps won't show their running indicator lights no matter what, like chromium. I am running the latest from the PPA on Natty

[Allen Lowe (lallenlowe)]

in fact, chromium is not even showing up in plank at all while running

[Allen Lowe (lallenlowe)]

ok, geting weirder still, if I launch chromium-browser from the command line, it shows up in the dock with the generic app icon, and the tooltip says "Chromium-browser"

[Robert Dyer (psybers)]

Sounds like a bamf issue.

[Allen Lowe (lallenlowe)]

let me add that, when this starts happening, a restart of plank generally solves the issue. that makes me think that perhaps plank isn't refreshing properly?

[jovan dragisic (jdragisic)]

Happens here too, but at random. I can open five applications that are pinned to the dock, all will show the light, but the sixth one will not. 0.2.0~bzr361-0

[Allen Lowe (lallenlowe)]

Yeah, turns out its basically random for me too

[Robert Dyer (psybers)]

Is this still affecting anyone?

[Jonathan Moerman (jonathanmoerman)]

Yes, but most of the time it starts reacting normal as soon as I start an app from the dock...

[Matthew Markell (markellmtthw)]

I and several others that I have talked to have noticed this happening still.

[Matthew Markell (markellmtthw)]

Related screen cap: http://imagebin.org/194461

XChat and Thunderbird are both open, but their indicator lights do not show.

[Rico Tzschichholz (ricotz)]

@markellmtthw: Please attach the complete output of "plank -d" when this is happening.

[Robert Dyer (psybers)]

@Matthew: and when this happens, if you right click on the Xchat (or whatever) icon do you see any windows listed in the popup menu? Does it say 'Close All' in the popup?

@Rico: is this a bamf bug? I think we need to have Matt get info from bamf and see if it is even listing any windows, what is the easiest way for a non-dev to verify that (as a dev, I would explore in dfeet)?

[Matthew Markell (markellmtthw)]

Sorry for not answering sooner, I forgot to add myself to the bugmail list.

@Rico Oh now that is weird, when I ran it with that option, all of the indicator lights appeared. Without that option, maybe 1 out of 8 or so will show. http://pastebin.com/QgyKEZPx
@Robert Everything functions properly except for the lights.

[Matthew Markell (markellmtthw)]

Also, Robert, I am a dev, let me know how I can help.

[Matthew Markell (markellmtthw)]

Here's the output after running for a few hours: http://pastebin.com/6FXqT3pk

[Robert Dyer (psybers)]

I can confirm this behavior on Ubuntu 11.10.

Note: this is NOT a bamf issue, BAMF is showing the proper information.

The only way I could reproduce this (fairly consistently) was to run Eclipse, close Eclipse, then run it again by clicking on its pinned icon in the dock. Running it via Do did not reproduce the problem.

In fact this trend works for just about any app (gcalc just did it too).

[Robert Dyer (psybers)]

Ok correction, now that these 2 are in that 'state' it doesn't matter how I run them, they will not show indicators.

Also note that I unpinned gcalc and now when I run it, there is NO icon on the dock at all.

[aquabanianskakid (barslund-bob)]

I'm experiencing the same problem with chromium not showing an indicator light. Sometimes it works, but I can't seem to figure out a pattern.

[Ezra Sharp (nicekiwi)]

I also have thins problem, currently Firefox 12, Terminal, Marlin, Gimp 2.8RC1, Sublime Text Editor, Switchboard and Search for files are not showing up. Only 4 out of the 10 launchers I have show indicator icons. So far it is still random.

[ktf (keithfancher)]

This affects me in both Ubuntu 11.10 and 12.04, using both the GTK2 and GTK3 versions (though incidentally, the GTK2 version seems much less crash-prone for me). The application that is affected seems to be totally random, and it isn't consistently reproducible. Every once in a while I notice it happening, then just "killall plank && plank" to fix it.

There seem to be two pieces to this bug, depending on whether the application is marked as "keep in dock" or not:

1) If the application is marked "keep in dock", there are no indicator lights, though the icon *is* highlighted correctly when the application is focused. The applications menu is correct too, with "maximize" and "close" entries, etc. Clicking the icon focuses the currently open window, as expected (or minimizes it if it's already focused).

2) If the application is not marked "keep in dock", it just doesn't show up at all.

In both of these cases, restarting plank temporarily solves the problem.

[Rico Tzschichholz (ricotz)]

trunk r626+r627 should take care of it

[ktf (keithfancher)]

Just updated 10 minutes ago or so... I haven't used it long enough to see for sure if this bug is fixed, though it hasn't happened yet!

There is one new issue though, which I'm assuming is related to the fix: now Plank seems to be overly aggressive as to what *is* put in the dock. I have two entries for "xfce4-panel" which shouldn't be there. And windows that didn't show up in the window list (or plank) before the update (calendar applets, conky, etc) now do. The "plank" item has also returned, even though I've removed its launcher item. My dock has gotten quite long, suddenly :)

[Robert Dyer (psybers)]

Yes, Rico's 'fix' is not good. So apparently the problem was that BAMF isn't doing a good job of marking things 'user visible' or not, so Rico removed our check for that. That fixes the issue of things not showing when they should... but also means things like dock windows, panels, etc (which are all not 'user visible') now show up.

[Robert Dyer (psybers)]

So now we at least have an idea what the problem is. That fix was reverted, but we can investigate and find a way to make this work!

[Rico Tzschichholz (ricotz)]

Fixed in trunk 634