GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 319963
improve error dialogs for file plug-ins
Last modified: 2018-05-24 11:39:46 UTC
When I pick a file from the Open Recent menu that's been moved or renamed, I get a very complex message from GIMP. It has two icons, two headings, and a lot of text that isn't necessary and can confuse the user.
Created attachment 53942 [details] screenshot of the problem Screenshot attached rather than text because of Bug 319962.
What do you suggest as a replacement text? Keep in mind that there are more reasons than "file does not exist" that could make the plug-in fail, for example.
The end-user doesn't need to know that a plug-in has failed. Most users don't even know that opening a file is handled by a plug-in. All they need to know is that the file could not be found. Here's what gedit says as an example: Could not find the file "/home/joachim/Desktop/foo"
If "Open Recent" could only open files, then it would make sense to check for existence before invoking a plug-in. But it is also capable of opening things specified by URLs, which makes it a bit tricky. Anyway, this is a long-standing issue. It used to be even worse: there used to be separate popups for each of the messages (see bug 92604). Anyway, the real issue here is one of communication between GIMP and its plug-ins. The main GIMP app does not always know enough to provide a sufficiently informative error message, but it is not prepared to trust plug-ins to provide good error messages either.
This basically boils down to bug #139354 which I have marked as a dependency now.
This is improving a lot in trunk. The fixes for bug #344818 allow us to push the file errors back to the caller. Most file plug-ins have been changed already. For these plug-ins, there is only a single error message left. In addition I plan to do some changes to the error dialogs that are used to show file errors. When that is done we can probably close this report.
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message -- This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity. You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/issues/166.