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Bug 430149 - Evolution should not open more than one instance per user
Evolution should not open more than one instance per user
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 490163
Product: evolution
Classification: Applications
Component: general
2.6.x (obsolete)
Other All
: Normal minor
: ---
Assigned To: Evolution Shell Maintainers Team
Evolution QA team
evolution[kill-bonobo]
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2007-04-16 00:04 UTC by Adalbert Dawid
Modified: 2009-01-28 18:33 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: 2.13/2.14


Description Adalbert Dawid 2007-04-16 00:04:38 UTC 
The title says it all... When I 'forget' about an already opened instance of evolution (which may be on a different workspace) and launch evo for a secod time, it opens up another window (which is empty, seemingly due to the fact that the mail dir is somehow locked by the first evo instance). So I have to close the useless evo window and search for the right one.

It would be a far better solution if evolution could detect on startup if it is already running for the current user, and - if so - activate the running instance by switching to its workspace and focussing it.

Other information:
Comment 1 Øystein Gisnås 2007-05-10 20:26:45 UTC 
This is related to #261169 although this bug focuses on opening only one instance, while the other bug is focused around mail locking.
Comment 2 alejandro vera 2007-06-16 16:14:43 UTC 
What about gtkunique??? i think it is developed for this case...
Comment 3 Pacho Ramos 2008-01-23 19:56:19 UTC 
I also agree with this. Evolution should simply restore already opened instance instead of launch a new one 

Thanks a lot :-)
Comment 4 Øystein Gisnås 2008-02-11 21:45:31 UTC 
On the other hand, the current behavior matches the one of several other applications, for example Firefox.

Performance wise it should be ok, since it reuses the process instance, and only opens a new window.

I can understand it a bit more when you use multiple workspaces, but that's a general problem with workspaces that is not solved (my personal opinion).
Comment 5 Adalbert Dawid 2008-02-12 11:23:25 UTC 
Well, I don't see why anyone would want to open several instances of a mail client, whereas it is a common use case to have several browser windows open, e.g. in order to group opened web pages by category.

Maybe evo should provide a command line switch like --new-instance for the case that the user really wants to open a new instance.
Comment 6 Matthew Barnes 2009-01-28 18:33:18 UTC 

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 490163 ***