drag and drop reordering of applications in gnome-main-menu is maddening

[GreySim]

Binary package hint: gnome-main-menu

Trying to reorder applications in the Favorite Applications section of the menu is near impossible, as when you move one entry around, other entries move in completely unpredictable ways. I'm not sure what could be causing this, but I do know that a version of gnome-main-menu that I had under Feisty from a third-party repository did not misbehave like this.

To reproduce:
1) Install gnome-main-menu and add to panel
2) Go into More Applications and right-click a few apps to Add to Favorites (removing the default entries makes no difference here, I've done it both ways)
3) Back in the main slab, drag the applications around to reorder them

I'm running with all the updates as of this bug report. Please let me know if I can provide more info.

[GreySim (greysim)]

There seems to be no mention of Gutsy on the final report page, so sorry if I misfiled it. I am running Gutsy.

[Ian B (ectogon)]

This bugs me too.

[GreySim (greysim)]

I don't know if this will help any, but the version I have installed in Feisty that works properly is 0.98~svn20070409-0ubuntu1, and the other listed available version (which is also what I get with apt-cache show) is 0.6.3~svn20070207-0ubuntu3, so it is a third party package of the new gnome-main-menu and not the old one in the repos. I don't remember where I got it though, and can't figure out how to find that out if it's possible, but I believe it came from the Tips & Tricks section of the Ubuntu forums. I'm sure it's too late to get whatever fix it is from that package, but maybe it'll be useful for a fix for an update after release, if found?

[shanen (Shannon Jacobs) (shanen)]

I was trying to reproduce this bug, but could not really figure out what kind of misbehavior they were describing. Either that or the bug they were talking about was fixed. Maybe I'm reporting a different problem with the package?

What I can report now is that the alternative of trying to use the "Move Up" button is very unpleasant to the point of brokenness. You have to reselect the target menu item again after each click, which is not reasonable behavior. If you are moving a menu entry up, you almost certainly will continue moving it up.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Is this symptom still reproducible in 8.10 RC or later?

[GreySim (greysim)]

I can't speak for the RC or later because I don't currently have a computer capable of running GNOME anymore, but as of about a week before the RC the symptoms were definitely still present in Intrepid.

[GreySim (greysim)]

This symptom is still reproducible in 9.04.

It is possible after all this time that upstream just changed the behaviour for the worse, I suppose. When I originally reported this long ago, I thought it was a simple backport type of thing, as there had been a "working" third-party repository version that did not exhibit this behaviour and worked as expected (the package was not in the official repos at all at the time, I believe).

[ian_hawdon (ian-hawdon)]

It's still there in 9.10 I'm afraid!

[Mila Kuchta (kuchta)]

The problem is still unsolved in the version 0.9.13-5 comming with ubuntu 10.4.

[Mila Kuchta (kuchta)]

I've probably found temporary solution to the problem.

Delete (or edit) file ~/.local/share/gnome-main-menu/applications.xbel.

Looks like the application has problem with orphaned entries...

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

> I've probably found temporary solution to the problem.
> Delete (or edit) file ~/.local/share/gnome-main-menu/applications.xbel.
> Looks like the application has problem with orphaned entries...

Attaching the file (in a state which causes this bug to happen afterwards) might provide useful information.