Unity causes Motif dialog window shrunk

[john ferrier]

Ubuntu 13.10 64bit version.

Nedit is a text editor based on Motif and I have used it for many year on various systems (Redhat *, OpenSuSe *, Ubuntu 9.10 ~13.10) and never have any problem.

However, after I ugraded my OS from Ubuntu 13.04 to 13.10, I noticed some wierd things related with the Find/Replace dialog window of Nedit. For example, if I press "ctrl+F" (shortcut for Finding string in file.), the dialog appears normal. However, as I use the finding function more and more, the dialog window appears in a smaller and smaller size.

So for me it seems something wrong in the current version of Unity and Mir.

You can find Nedit in Ubuntu's Software Center.

If you need any information, please let me know.

Thank you.

Related bugs:
 bug 1102024: Restoring a maximized Gnome Terminal window with keybinding fails to restore the original geometry
 bug 1228470: Unity causes Motif dialog window shrunk
 bug 1233205: maximize then unmaximize of gnome-terminal shrinks window

[john ferrier (john-j-ferrier)]

Sorry some mistakes in my original bug description.

This bug has nothing to do with Mir.

[john ferrier (john-j-ferrier)]

Please let me know if there is any progress so that I can roll back to Ubuntu 13.10.
Thank you.
JF

[john ferrier (john-j-ferrier)]

Is this bug planned to be fixed before the official release of Ubuntu 13.10?

If it 's not, I have to stay away from 13.10 until it is fixed.

Please don't keep silent.

Thank you!

[Stephen M. Webb (bregma)]

This bug will not be fixed for the initial release of 13.10. If someone can come up with a patch it is a candidate for the SRU procedure.

[john ferrier (john-j-ferrier)]

Thank you for the reply.

I don't think anybody outside unity team can fix it if this is really a unity bug. So in another word it won't be fixed.

[john ferrier (john-j-ferrier)]

Tried Ubuntu-Gnome-beta2 today and found no such a problem.

[john ferrier (john-j-ferrier)]

Some additional information: If I maximize this Find/Replace dialog window then it won't shrink in the later uses.

As this bug can be reproduced EVERY TIME, I guess it's easy to debug. Can any developer dig into the code and see what's wrong? Or What can I do as a user to help solving this problem?

[john ferrier (john-j-ferrier)]

I know little about Ubuntu/Unity's bug report and administration procedure so I have a question: for such a bug (status of Triaged and importance of Medium) usually how soon can it be fixed? If I understand correctly the bug has been reproduced by Unity developper(s).

Please don't misunderstand me - I am just asking a guess according to past experience as I have to stay with 13.04 for the moment.

Thanks for any reply.

[Stephen M. Webb (bregma)]

@john

We'd love to be able to give you an estimate on when a fix for this can be delivered, but the reality is we can't at this point. Yes, I can easily reproduce the problem. That's a far cry from being able to identify the cause. The good news (for you) is that this or a similar problem seems to occur with a number of applications (for example gnome-terminal), so it's very likely a fix will be found some time in the next few months. More than that I make no promises.

[john ferrier (john-j-ferrier)]

Thank you Stephen,

That's good enough.

[Eleni Maria Stea (hikiko)]

Since there are other priorities I stopped looking at this bug for a while.

Here's a couple of things that could help to solve it:
1. It seems to be related to this bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/1156919
2. It occurs in the motif popups that use the XmCreateFormDialog motif function (I tested nedit, xpdf and a few other motif programs)

I'll get a look again when I have some time.

[john ferrier (john-j-ferrier)]

Well, as I said in older version of Ubuntu and Unity I don't have problems, so it doesn't show a strong link with https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/1156919, and this has nothing to do with Java.

By the way, I think this is a fundamental bug of Unity and it should be fixed with high prioroty. It doesn't crash any thing, but it indicates some basic things wrong in Unity.

[Orawa (orawa66)]

Same happens with Pidgin Buddies window. The window appears smaller every time I minimize it to tray and maximize again. XFCE+Compiz here, so not an Unity bug?

[john ferrier (john-j-ferrier)]

Similar with "maximize then unmaximize of gnome-terminal shrinks window" (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1233205).

[Stephen M. Webb (bregma)]

The commonality with all of these bugs appears to be some call to the X11 server to set or get some property that may or may not be handled as expected by Compiz. It is not clear what the call is, and because of that it's not clear if the problem is in Compiz (it's not handling it correctly) or in the client code (they're all relying on incorrect behaviour that just happened to not break in the past).

It's also not clear if the key to the problem is in Compiz proper or in the Unity plugin in Compiz, since we don't know exactly what the problem is.

We're deferring further investigation for the time being so we can focus on problems that have a greater impact on a larger portion of our userbase. This does not mean it is not important and that we don't intend to fix it, but we do not have unlimited resources and can't do everything everyone wants immediately.

Thanks.

[Eleni Maria Stea (hikiko)]

I forgot to mention that the shrunks/misplacements are equal to the window decoration size (tested) so, I suspect that in some cases the previous position of the popup is saved before the unmap (so that the popup appears at the same position at the next map) but when the programs ask compiz to return the prev. popup position, compiz returns the window position without counting the window border.

I also don't know yet why only motif and java programs have this problem. I've never seen it in qt gtk programs for example so far...

[Eleni Maria Stea (hikiko)]

@orawa66, I didn't manage to reproduce it with Pidgin in Unity but it's interesting!

[john ferrier (john-j-ferrier)]

I don't how the development is done for Ubuntu. If you can still find the snapshots of the development then it's easy to find what happened.

For example, for "nedit" mentioned above, we know there is no problem for version 13.04 and problems for version 13.10. By loading different snapshots between these two versions we can detect what changes causes this problem. It would be helpful to understand the problem.

[john ferrier (john-j-ferrier)]

This bug has been fixed in "https://bugs.launchpad.net/compiz/+bug/1238111".