auto-hidden panel sometime jumps to the top of the screen

[jmspeex]

Binary package hint: gnome-panel

I'm noticing two (probably related) problems with the panel in autohide mode. Both seem to have to do with timing:
1) Sometimes when the panel un-hides, it jumps to the top of the screen (I have it at the bottom) so I need to move it down. This typically happens about twice a day.
2) When clicking on the main menu button, sometimes the panel hides itself and the menu pops up too low -- the bottom of the menu is aligned with the bottom of the screen instead of the top of the (still un-hiden) panel.
In both these cases, it seems to happen when un-hiding the panel (or bringing up the menu) requires a disk access (swap or files not in OS cache), causing a slight delay. That's why I'd say it's probably timing-related.

[jmspeex (jean-marc-valin)]

One note about the second one. Because the menu is displayed too low, it sometimes happen that simply clicking on the main menu ends up selecting "Quit" (which is the first element) at the same time. Quite annoying.

[jmspeex (jean-marc-valin)]

Oh and
3) The Deskbar applet doesn't cope well with auto-hide at all. When moving the cursor on the "popup list", the panel hides itself. When moving the cursor back to the panel, the list disappears.

[jmspeex (jean-marc-valin)]

Not sure if would be part of the same bug because it's not only with auto-hide. When the icons on the main menu take too long to load, the menu shows up with the size it would take without the icons. Then, when the icons appear, the menu does not grow and a vertical scrollbar appears on the menu. This means that the appearance of the menus ends up depending on the speed of the disk you have -- at least the first time you use them.

[jmspeex (jean-marc-valin)]

The following setup should make it easier to reproduce the bug:
1) Turn auto-hide on (of course) with an un-hide timeout of 0
2) Turn the HD DMA off
3) Make sure that the machine is swapping a bit
4) Lower the CPU frequency (e.g. 600 MHz - 1 GHz)

This is obviously extreme, but it should make the problem happen more often. My actual setup (where the bug still happens) is:
Pentium-M 2.13 GHz (with powernowd often reducing speed to 800 MHz)
1 GB RAM, no swap
HD DMA on.

[jmspeex (jean-marc-valin)]

Here's what it looks like when the bug (two of the points listed) happens. All I had to do is not use the menu for a while so it would be swapped out and take time to be swapped back in.

[jmspeex (jean-marc-valin)]

And here's what it should look like, and what it actually looks like if I repeat what I did in the first screenshot when the menus have been swapped back in.

[jmspeex (jean-marc-valin)]

Anything else needed to "confirm" this bug? I would think the screenshots should be enough to see what's going on.

[Onkar Shinde (onkarshinde)]

Does this happen only when panel is at bottom?
Also is the panel resized to something more than normal?

I use panel at top. And I could not reproduce it.

[jmspeex (jean-marc-valin)]

I've seen the same problem on a panel with default size and with a panel of size 52. I've been trying a bit with the panel at the top. I've tried with the panel up and I haven't been able to reproduce the jumping panel bug. Maybe the bug is only with panel at the bottom or maybe it's because of the way I use it when it's at the bottom. In any case, the bug happens for me about once a day or so. The more vm activity there is, the more the bug happens, which is why I think it's related to timing issues.

For example, say the panel has a hide timeout of 300 ms and is currently hidden. I "touch" it with the mouse pointer to make it show up, but quickly move my pointer away. It seems like the panel starts counting (hide timeout) at the moment I ask it to unhide. If it takes more than 300 ms for the panel to appear (machine swaps), it actually tries to hide itself before it has even unhidden itself from the first action. That leads to strange behaviour like what I describe in this bug report (and other oddities as well).

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug. Please describe one issue by bug, it makes much easier to reply and manager the bug

The first issue looks like http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171938 upstream
The second issue is probably a duplicate of bug #30146
The third one might be a deskbar-applet issue like bug #4873

I'm marking that bug as forwarded to GNOME #171938 since the other issues have different bugs already or are not due to the panel

[jmspeex (jean-marc-valin)]

The first and third issues are indeed covered in the bugs you linked. The second, however isn't:
2) When clicking on the main menu button, sometimes the panel hides itself and the menu pops up too low -- the bottom of the menu is aligned with the bottom of the screen instead of the top of the (still un-hiden) panel.

If you look at the screenshots I attached, they show two bugs at the same time. The one from bug #30146 is that the menus are truncated. The one I had in 2) is that the toplevel menu opened too low (hiding part of the panel). These may or may not be related.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

I think that's the same issue, the scrolling is due to the misplacement

[Зоран Рилак (zoran.rilak)]

I can confirm the issue stated here. I use a panel on the right side of the screen and it sometimes moves off to the left after the pointer leaves it "too fast" (definition needed here). It's easy to reproduce by setting "[un]hide delay" properties to 0 and then rotating your mouse against the edge of the screen where the panel is hidden, making it show up and go back in quick succession. Panel's "position" property remains unchanged though.

[Зоран Рилак (zoran.rilak)]

I have tracked down the bug and submitted the patch to gnome-bugs #171938. This is my first patch ever and I'm rather curious how things go on from here :)

[Зоран Рилак (zoran.rilak)]

I'm putting the patch here to see what it does to my karma. Up there, my "real" karma probably suffers, but I just have to give it a go.

[Зоран Рилак (zoran.rilak)]

Ouch.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

fixed upstream

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug on that. This patch upload the issue:

 gnome-panel (2.15.91-0ubuntu2) edgy; urgency=low
 .
   * debian/patches/90_from_cvs_fix_auto_hidden_panel_jumping.patch:
     - patch from upstream CVS, fix auto hidden panel jumping to the other side
       of the screen, patch worked by Зоран Рилак <email address hidden>
       (Ubuntu: #48226)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

I'll backport that change to a dapper-updates update

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Fixed to dapper with this upload:

 gnome-panel (2.14.3-0ubuntu2) dapper-updates; urgency=low
 .
   * debian/patches/90_from_cvs_fix_auto_hidden_panel_jumping.patch:
     - patch from upstream CVS, fix auto hidden panel jumping to the other side
        of the screen, patch worked by Зоран Рилак <email address hidden>
        (Ubuntu: #48226)

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

 gnome-panel (2.14.3-0ubuntu2) dapper-updates; urgency=low
 .
   * debian/patches/90_from_cvs_fix_auto_hidden_panel_jumping.patch:
     - patch from upstream CVS, fix auto hidden panel jumping to the other side
        of the screen, patch worked by �о�ан Рилак <email address hidden>
        (Ubuntu: #48226)

I rejected this old upload, since it hasn't gone through the usual SRU process, and TBH this bug does not really warrant an SRU. But if you think it is appropriate, please start the SRU process.