A rather mysterious issue has cropped up on the user list, and I'm
moving it over here hoping someone will have a clue where to look. I'd
file a bug report, but I'm not entirely sure it's a LyX bug.
Symptom: On some systems, the file dialog opened by File > Import >
LaTeX (plain)... fails to find .tex files with the default file filter
(*.tex) but sees them when you switch the filter to all files.
Now comes the goofy part.
* The original report was by a user of Linux Mint 18 (Sarah), in both
the Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments, using the version of LyX
2.3.2 from Liviu's repository, on two different machines.
* On my desktop (Mint 18.3 Sylvia, MATE, same version of LyX from same
repo) I cannot reproduce this problem.
* On my laptop (Mint 19.1 Tessa, MATE, same version of LyX from same
repo) I can reproduce the problem.
* Someone else reported the problem on Ubuntu 18.04 (also LyX 2.3.2,
provenance unknown).
It doesn't seem to be a function of the desktop environment (MATE on
both my systems), nor to an old versus new OS version (my desktop is a
newer version the OP's and an older version than my laptop).
It doesn't seem to a function of the Qt version (identical across OP's
machine and both of mine), nor the specific compilation of LyX (same
binary, down to the compile date, on both my machines).
I don't think it's a MIME type issue. Both my desktop and my laptop give
me the same MIME type (text/x-tex) for a .tex file.
I ran LyX with -dbg any on both systems, and both times when I opened
the import menu item I saw the same info for the file filter:
Select with path "/home/paul", mask "LaTeX (plain) (*.tex);;All Files
(*)", suggested ""
There is one other oddity, which may or may not be related to the
problem. Despite the fact that the OP and I are running the same version
of LyX (2.3.2) built with the same version of Qt (4.8.7) under the same
desktop environment (MATE) on fundamentally the same OS (Mint), her file
dialog and the file dialog on my laptop look the same as each other but
different from the file dialog on my desktop (where things work). The
layout of controls is a bit different, and on her machine and my laptop
the filter select control is a button that just says "LaTeX" (with a
down arrow to change types) whereas on my desktop there is a label field
and a select control, with the select control entry defaulting to "LaTeX
(plain) (*.tex)".
I don't see anything like this in the bug tracker. Any suggestions on
something I can test here? Should I file a bug report?
Thanks,
Paul