Gnome on Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS text copying triggers apparently useless file writes

[Thinking Torus]

Description:

I recently noticed a strange behavior on my (pretty vanilla) Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS. Every time I copy some text from GNOME Terminal, using keyboard or mouse, it triggers a little hard drive activity.

Intrigued, I decided to see what was going on (persistent clipboard data?). After some investigation, I found out that the activity is due to a file being written to whenever I do a copy in GNOME Terminal (or in other apps):

    ~/.config/nautilus/desktop-metadata

The small file seems to record the nautilus view settings and the trash icon state, has no apparent relation to functions of the clipboard, and does not mutate following each write (the content stays unchanged).

I also tested to see if the same happens on a different computer running 18.04.2 desktop live usb, and the answer is yes. So this shouldn't be something particular to my system.

--------------------
Steps to reproduce:

* Boot your computer using live CD or usb created with:
ubuntu-18.04.2-desktop-amd64.iso
You can obtain it from:
http://releases.ubuntu.com/18.04/
last modified: 2019-02-10 00:27
sha256: 22580b9f3b186cc66818e60f44c46f795d708a1ad86b9225c458413b638459c4)

* Start Gnome Terminal, copy some text from there, and note the current time when you perform the copying

* Check the timestamp of ~/.config/nautilus/desktop-metadata and observe it's been modified at the same time you did the copying

* Repeat as many times as you like

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Expected behavior:

Copying text in Gnome should not trigger writes to some arbitrary file (and should not trigger any disk IO at all).

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

To change the source package that this bug is filed about visit https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1836960/+editstatus and add the package name in the text box next to the word Package.

[This is an automated message. I apologize if it reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Since Nautilus isn't used in newer Ubuntu versions this bug will probably not be fixed.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Could you report it upstream to https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/issues/ ?

[Thinking Torus (thinking-torus)]

Done.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/issues/1323