evince no longer remembers last used folder/directory when saving

[clubsoda]

On upgrading from Xubuntu 16.04 (xenial) to Xubuntu 18.04.2 LTS (bionic), evince no longer saves a copy of a downloaded document to the previously used directory for saving documents but defaults to $HOME every time.

As a workaround, downgrading evince, evince-common, libevdocument3-4 and libevview3-3 from their bionic version 3.28.4-0ubuntu1 to their xenial version 3.18.2-1ubuntu4.6 restores the expected behaviour.

For users unfamiliar, those old packages may be obtained for example from:-
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/xenial/amd64/evince/

Regards.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report. What directory is the document located in?

It seems similar to upstream https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/-/issues/909 but the behaviour should be that it stores in the same directory as the current document by default, or if it's a temp location then fallback to the document directory and it's not there to the user dir

[clubsoda (clubsoda)]

Nice find, thank-you. It's good at least to know why it's broken.

scenario:
A firefox downloaded PDF comes up in evince from /tmp/mozilla_user0
I want to save a copy to $HOME/preferred/directory using ctrl-s

As a test, I added a soft link from ~/Documents to ~/preferred/directory and tried the same procedure with evince 3.28.4 but it still wants to save to $HOME.

The newer version also removes the menu bar and the hotkey hints so for now I'm sticking with evince 3.18.2

I guess this is a WONTFIX but thanks again.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Indeed, feel free to argue upstream if you think the behaviour is wrong but we are not going to change it in Ubuntu to something different from what evince decides