In chat rooms, empathy should not scroll to the bottom whenever a new message is received.

Bug #542806 reported by Matthew Pirocchi
134
This bug affects 25 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Adium Theme Ubuntu
Fix Released
Undecided
Ken VanDine
One Hundred Papercuts
Fix Released
Low
Nicolò Chieffo
adium-theme-ubuntu (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Low
Unassigned
Nominated for Lucid by Michael Lazarev
empathy (Ubuntu)
Invalid
Low
Unassigned
Nominated for Lucid by Michael Lazarev

Bug Description

Binary package hint: empathy

This is incredibly frustrating. It is nearly impossible to look back through the history of a reasonably-active chat room, because every time a new message is received, empathy scrolls back down to the bottom. This isn't even a good idea in one-on-one chats (if you're looking at the history, it's for a reason), but it makes empathy completely unusable in chat rooms.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Sat Mar 20 12:30:28 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" - Beta i386 (20100318)
Package: empathy 2.29.93-0ubuntu2
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-16.25-generic
SourcePackage: empathy
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-16-generic i686

Tags: patch lucid

Related branches

Revision history for this message
Matthew Pirocchi (matthew-pirocchi) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Omer Akram (om26er) wrote :

I can confirm this behavior too and I think this might only be caused with the adium theme we are using in Ubuntu, I will test it in a few hours

Changed in empathy (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Low
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Omer Akram (om26er) wrote :

Yes this only happens with the adium theme.

Revision history for this message
Nicolò Chieffo (yelo3) wrote :

This patch fixes the problem

Changed in adium-theme-ubuntu (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Nicolò Chieffo (yelo3) wrote :

The patch does not fix the automatic scroll when resizing windows

Revision history for this message
Nicolò Chieffo (yelo3) wrote :

There is a comment in the code: "nearBottom buggy with inactive tabs" so it is not possible to use it.

Anyway I can't find a scenario in which the chat should scroll after resizing the window.
I will attach also a deb

Revision history for this message
Nicolò Chieffo (yelo3) wrote :

Please test if the attached deb selves the problem, and if it does the correct thing when resizing the chat window

Omer Akram (om26er)
tags: added: patch
Revision history for this message
Michal Predotka (mpredotka) wrote :

I've installed this deb and it seams to work well. I have tested with only one IRC window without any tabs.

Revision history for this message
Nicolò Chieffo (yelo3) wrote : Re: [Bug 542806] Re: In chat rooms, empathy should not scroll to the bottom whenever a new message is received.

Did you test what happens when you resize the window in many ways?

Revision history for this message
Michal Predotka (mpredotka) wrote :

Sorry, I did not. At the moment I'm on Karmic. I'll test tomorrow probably.

Revision history for this message
Nicolò Chieffo (yelo3) wrote :

The only problem I had is that when resizing the window vertically to
a smaller size (with the scrollbar to the bottom), the scrollbar is
moved up.
Anyway I find this is an acceptable regression. Let the developer choose.

Revision history for this message
Gatestone (app-iki) wrote :

Please fix this in the official repos before Lucid release. Empathy is the default IRC client and #ubuntu is AN EXTREMELY important element of the Ubuntu culture. BTW, when you first start Empathy, the wizard does not let you install IRC. You have to quit it and and go to create account to use IRC.

It should definitively be so that when you launch Empathy (or whatever happens to be the distro default for IRC) it shoudl automatically sign you to #ubuntu. Like I guess some other IRC cients do. Or was it just on Debian...

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

IRC might be used in the ubuntu community but stays rather a technical user tool, empathy is an im client not a dedicated IRC one but there is enough of those available in Ubuntu for those who need one, the team focus is on other issues which lead to non working installation now for lucid rather than on optimizing a non IRC client for IRC

Revision history for this message
Nicolò Chieffo (yelo3) wrote :

This bug also affects normal 1-1 chat windows

Revision history for this message
Michael Lazarev (milaz) wrote :

I just nominated this bug for Lucid.
I confirm that the patch by Nicolò Chieffo fixes this bug.
Given that, I hope it won't be hard for developers to include it into Lucid.

Revision history for this message
Nigel Babu (nigelbabu) wrote :

Thanks for the patch Nicolò, can you forward it upstream to hear their take on it? Please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME for more details on forwarding to GNOME upstream.

tags: added: patch-needswork
removed: patch
Revision history for this message
Nicolò Chieffo (yelo3) wrote :

There's no upstream for this patch. It's a patch to ubuntu theme

Revision history for this message
Nigel Babu (nigelbabu) wrote :

Apologies, I mistakenly thought you were patching empathy.

Revision history for this message
Nicolò Chieffo (yelo3) wrote :

Invalidating the empathy task, since the patch is for adium-theme-ubuntu

tags: added: patch
removed: patch-needswork
Changed in empathy (Ubuntu):
status: Confirmed → Invalid
Revision history for this message
JeffV (jeff-launchpad-tanasity) wrote :

This behavior makes Empathy unusable in quick-moving IRC rooms.

@13: Understandably, before Lucid getting working installations was more important, but now that Lucid has launched IMO this should be treated as an important issue: since Empathy is the default Ubuntu IM client, it should work properly.

Revision history for this message
Paul Stadig (pjstadig) wrote :

Really, really, annoying! IRC chat is unusable.

Revision history for this message
Paul Stadig (pjstadig) wrote :

However, the above .deb package (and I assume the patch) works!

Revision history for this message
Nicolò Chieffo (yelo3) wrote :

I don't know how to gain the developers attention to get a review of the patch

Omer Akram (om26er)
tags: removed: apport-bug i386
Changed in adium-theme-ubuntu (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Low
Revision history for this message
Omer Akram (om26er) wrote :

there is a working package attached by nicolo which works fine. I dont think we need this to be backported for Lucid as it will be a change in the default behavior of an app but sure we could get it fixed for maverick.

Revision history for this message
Chris Beaven (smileychris) wrote :

Personally, I'd consider the current behavior of not respecting a user's scrollback as a bug, and therefore worthy of a backport.

Vish (vish)
Changed in hundredpapercuts:
importance: Undecided → Low
milestone: none → maverick-round-3-social-networking
status: New → Triaged
Omer Akram (om26er)
Changed in adium-theme-ubuntu (Ubuntu):
status: Confirmed → Triaged
Revision history for this message
iTorrey (rice) wrote :

This patch looks good to me. Definitely was an annoying issue that I'm considering removing from the Adium theme as well.

Changed in adium-theme-ubuntu:
assignee: nobody → Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)
Revision history for this message
Vish (vish) wrote :

Marking as in-progress since Ken will be uploading the patch shortly

Changed in adium-theme-ubuntu:
status: New → In Progress
Changed in hundredpapercuts:
status: Triaged → In Progress
Revision history for this message
Nicolò Chieffo (yelo3) wrote :

Did you commit the patch?

Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

This bug was fixed in the package adium-theme-ubuntu - 0.3-0ubuntu1

---------------
adium-theme-ubuntu (0.3-0ubuntu1) maverick; urgency=low

  * New upstream release.
    - History shown in Empathy chat window should be different
      from new messages (LP: #531811)
    - In chat rooms, empathy should not scroll to the bottom whenever
      a new message is received. (LP: #542806)
    - Merged patch from Omer Akram, we shouldn't hard code font
      sizes (LP: #531835)
  * debian/control
    - Set Vcs-Bzr
  * debian/copyright
    - Dropped reference to the deprecated BSD license file, the contents are
      included in the copyright file
 -- Ken VanDine <email address hidden> Wed, 11 Aug 2010 19:04:05 -0400

Changed in adium-theme-ubuntu (Ubuntu):
status: Triaged → Fix Released
Vish (vish)
Changed in hundredpapercuts:
status: In Progress → Fix Released
Changed in adium-theme-ubuntu:
status: In Progress → Fix Released
Changed in hundredpapercuts:
assignee: nobody → Nicolò Chieffo (yelo3)
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