GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 766473
Projects not being remebered
Last modified: 2016-08-25 21:22:42 UTC
Gitg doesn't remember previously added projects if "Usage & history" is disabled in the Gnome privacy preferences. I'm not sure if this is intended behaviour, but unlike e.g. the file manager history, projects are explicitly added in gitg. The expectation is that after adding a project it will be always available in the list until explicitly removed. Also git projects are for most users not a privacy issue, at least not in the same sense as previously opened documents can be.
I had the same issue. Did you disable the history in Settings > Privacy ? When I re-enable it, the repositories will stay in the list.
Yes I did, and it works exactly as you describe. The problem is, while I like gitg to remember my past projects, I do not want e.g. my file history to be remembered. That setting seems to be an all-or-nothing deal.
We (ab)use the recently used file system of gtk+ to implement the project list. Projects are not only explicitly added, opening any repository (for example from cli), will have the repository end up in the list. This is the same as the behavior you would have in applications such as gedit. The only immediate way around this would be not to use the recent storage for remembering opened projects, but it's not clear to me what the expectancy of all users would be (I can imagine users expect privacy settings to apply to gitg projects as well). Ideally privacy settings would be more granular, but I'm not sure such a thing is planned.
I understand the thought process and it's honestly what I was expecting, though I don't really see gitg in the same category as gedit but rather in the same as an IDE, such as Eclipse, Idea, or others. My experience with many different IDEs and developer tools is that projects are always remembered by default. This is mostly because there are usually no privacy issues regarding dev projects, unlike say, photos or emails. I would go further to say that the user experience is confusing when "usage & history" is disabled. The button "Add project" is wrongly labelled and should be instead named "open project". It's also confusing that the projects are remembered for the duration of the gitg session but aren't there once the program is restarted. Nautilus, gedit and other applications do not show recent opened files if the setting is disabled, regardless of the current session state.
Even there will no more granular setting for privacy it would be nice to see an hint that the projects are not stored. I didn't recognize that gitg and the history are bound together until I take a look into the bug list.
I agree, I think we should change our implementation to not use GtkRecentManager, but just GBookmarkFile. We could still offer a "privacy" setting for gitg itself if need be.
Fixed by using a gitg specific bookmarks file to maintain the list of recently used repositories.
*** Bug 760265 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***