Those of you with access to MS-Outlook and OpenOffice might take a look at how file selection is done in those settings and compare to this problem.
The situation is this: I'm editing a message in Evolution and want to include a different signature. Like many of you, I have lots of different witticisms and aphorisms, and it might happen that one of them is more suited than my default signature. I'm sure you've been in a similar situation. So I use the menu => insert => inline text option. Up comes the file chooser. Awful one, isn't it? That's why I referred to the one in Outlook. I know the guys at Ximian aren't to blame for standard Gnome libraries. I know compared to the directory selector in GQView, OpenOffice and Outlook, its pretty lame. I know some sources on GTK+ programming explicitly admit its lame. But my point is that I can get it crash evolution quite easily and quite repeatedly. My question is twofold: 1) is it the fault of evolution? 2) can things be configured so it doesn't happen without reprogramming? First: how to reproduce the problem. As I said, I want a different signature. My signature files are in a subdirectory ~/.signatures. Each is a text file. I do the "menu => insert => inline text" thin and get a modal dialogue box that opens on my home directory. It doesn't show the 'hidden' files or directories. It doesn't show recently accessed files or directories (which I see is an option in the programming spec, one used - albeit in a different dialogue box - by GQView. That all may be beside the point. My "problem" is that I can't see or select the directory I want and hence the file I want. So I enter, variously, ".signatures" - hoping it will change directory, ".signatures/guessed_name.txt". In each case the dialogue box errors. Presumably it hands back a value to the Evolution message editor that the latter cannot handle, that there is no callback handler for. Whatever, the result is that the body of the editor window becomes blank and I get a message saying the mail handler component of evolution has died and I need to shutdown and restart evolution. Credit to the guys at Ximian: the message WAS saved (though not as a draft). If there really is no handling of the error return then the answer to (1) is yes, and that's disappointing. Error handling, checking for bad return values, is pretty fundamental. I hope this isn't the case. Maybe someone familiar with the source can look-see and if necessary enter a bug report. An overview of the GTK programming manual doesn't make it clear to me whether GtkFileSection() default directory CList can be overridden. As for point (2), if it can be, perhaps an environment variable would determine if the hidden files and directories are included. Yes, I know the 'correct' answer is to replace the dialogue box with something more sensible, more like the MS-Windows or the OpenOffice one. (The latter shows it CAN be done!) Another answer would be to have an "insert => signature" and signature previewer and chooser like in Outlook, but that seems too much to hope for. Or is there some other way to force the GtkFileSelection() dialogue box to show me 'hidden' files and directories? Anton J Aylward _______________________________________________ evolution maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/evolution
