Right click > Create Document breaks if Templates folder is missing when Gnome is restarted

[Omegamormegil]

Binary package hint: nautilus

About a week ago I noticed that I could no longer create new documents from the templates in my Templates folder. This looks like a regression, because I just started using this feature last month running Karmic Alpha 6. I have tried deleting and recreating the Templates folder to no effect. I currently have 3 OOo Writer documents and 1 text file in the Templates folder, and when I right click in Nautilus, and go to Create Document I get "No Templates Installed" and the empty file option only.

I have attached a screenshot demonstrating the error.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Wed Oct 14 13:34:28 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
NonfreeKernelModules: wl
Package: nautilus 1:2.28.0-0ubuntu6
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-13.45-generic
SourcePackage: nautilus
Tags: ubuntu-unr
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-13-generic i686

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for the report, that works fine here, just did a "touch ~/Templates/blah.txt" and it's listed right after that on the templates option on nautilus, could you try the same with a new user created on your system? Thanks.

[Omegamormegil (omegamormegil)]

Thanks Pedro, I should have checked that. I tested this in a Guest session and it appears to work. Do you know I'd have to do to reset this functionality? I'm not sure where the nautilus config stuff hides.

[Omegamormegil (omegamormegil)]

Well, last week I reinstalled Ubuntu (not because of this bug) and got my Templates functionality back. I used this functionality Sunday to create a document from an OpenOffice.org Writer template I have and it worked great.

However, I just tried starting another document this way, and the bug has resurfaced! The right click menu would have be believe that I have no Templates installed. So, this bug may be low priority, but it wasn't a glitch. If anyone knows how to reset this functionality without formatting my hard drive :) please to let me know. I really like this feature.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

would be nice to have a few easy steps in order to reproduce the issue, could you tell us a few ones? thanks.

[Omegamormegil (omegamormegil)]

I figured out what is going on. My Templates folder is on removable media which fstab mounts automatically. When I boot and the media is removed, xdg-user-dirs-update runs and is moving the path from ~/Templates to ~ when it sees that the folder is missing. To fix the problem, I had to manually edit .config/user-dirs.dirs to correct the path to the templates folder.

I don't see any reason for xdg-user-dirs-update to change the path just because the folder is temporarily missing or moved. The expected behavior would be that moving the Templates folder would break the right click > Create Document functionality, and moving it back would fix the problem, but after xdg-user-dirs-update runs (every boot) the functionality is broken permanently which is very confusing to the user.

[Omegamormegil (omegamormegil)]

To duplicate, move your Templates folder to the Desktop, and run xdg-user-dirs-update in the terminal. You will see: "/home/nate/Templates was removed, reassigning TEMPLATES to homedir"

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

do you expect it to use a non available directory? not a bug

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

duplicate bug #285998