list of printers in print dialog jumps fast, hard to select a printer

[Darko Veberic]

when opening a gtk print dialog (evince, firefox etc), the list of printers is jumping up and down when many printers are listed. i am not sure if this is related to cups reporting different number of printers each time asked or is this some kind of a list sorting problem in gnome when repeated sorting is not stable.

the behavior is quite annoying since it is very hard to select a particular printer from such a list that changes so fast.

the attachment illustrates the issue.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 15.10
Package: libgtk-3-0 3.16.7-0ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.2.0-21.25-generic 4.2.6
Uname: Linux 4.2.0-21-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.19.1-0ubuntu5
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: XFCE
Date: Thu Dec 17 10:01:31 2015
InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-10-21 (421 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Release amd64 (20140722.2)
SourcePackage: gtk+3.0
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to wily on 2015-12-03 (14 days ago)

[Darko Veberic (darko-veberic-kit)]

this has been the same since ages. please see the attached desktop video capture. the list of printers is in my opinion (a) refreshed too fast and (b) whatever is the sort algorithm for the order in the window, it's not stable, ie each time it produces a slightly different list of printers. it's extremely hard to select the correct printer below the point where it starts to deviate by each update. this is agonizing.

note that this is not limited to just the evince print dialog, as shown in the attachment. it affects all print dialogs of all the gtk applications.

[Darko Veberic (darko-veberic-kit)]

bump. affects all ubuntus from 15.10 to 17.04.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue you are reporting is an upstream one and it would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug to the developers of the software by following the instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME. If you have done so, please tell us the number of the upstream bug (or the link), so we can add a bugwatch that will inform us about its status. Thanks in advance.