[intrepid] no prompt to save open work on shutdown/restart

Bug #276134 reported by zombiepig
42
This bug affects 4 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
gnome-session
Fix Released
Unknown
gnome-session (Ubuntu)
Triaged
Low
Ubuntu Desktop Bugs
Nominated for Intrepid by Martin Soto
Nominated for Jaunty by Don Cristóbal

Bug Description

For a while intrepid switched to the new gnome shutdown warning prompt, where you are alerted to unsaved work before the logoff procedure starts.

However, this dialog is no longer shown (alpha 6+all updates to 30/9), and shutting down the workstation with open, unsaved work doesn't lead to any prompts-- the system just happily shuts down and loses the work.

This is potentially a huge regression, and could result in hours of lost work!

Changed in gnome-session:
status: Unknown → New
Changed in gnome-session:
assignee: nobody → desktop-bugs
importance: Undecided → Low
status: New → Triaged
Revision history for this message
Martin Soto (soto255) wrote :

This happens to me as well with Intrepid Beta updated today. I tested with both an old and a new account with equal results. A simple way to test is just opening Firefox, visiting some URL and ending the GNOME session (a log out will do, no need to shut down). If you log in again and start Firefox it will report that the previous session was terminated abruptly. Other applications, such as OpenOffice are similarly affected.

I reported this already in Bug #249373, which is not exactly about this same issue, but that is apparently related. In that bug report user Lukas Hejtmanek confirms that he's observing the same behavior.

This bug *should not* be triaged as low priority. It is not only a serious regression, but *will cause data loss* when a user forgets saving before ending her session. I would appreciate people to check if they observe the problem and report here, so that the bug can be at least set to CONFIRMED.

Revision history for this message
Martin Soto (soto255) wrote :

I reported this in GNOME Bugzilla (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=555795) but the report remains unanswered. Also, the watched Bugzilla bug 553166 seems to be related, but is not about the same problem.

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

the reason it's not set as a blocker is that questions on session closing has never been something working reliably, only gedit is blocking the session in the GNOME desktop for example so that's not something user have been relying on, that would still something nice to get fixed though

Revision history for this message
Martin Soto (soto255) wrote : Re: [Bug 276134] Re: [intrepid] no prompt to save open work on shutdown/restart

On Mon, 2008-10-27 at 11:34 +0000, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> the reason it's not set as a blocker is that questions on session
> closing has never been something working reliably, only gedit is
> blocking the session in the GNOME desktop for example so that's not
> something user have been relying on, that would still something nice to
> get fixed though

That this never worked reliably is simply not true. With the old GNOME
session manager (<=2.22), programs supporting the old XSMP protocol
(Firefox, OpenOffice, Gimp, and most programs using the GNOME libraries)
were indeed able to block session shutdown and ask you if you wanted to
save work (you can test it on Hardy). Also, for programs not supporting
XSMP, the session manager would ask you to terminate them by hand before
shutting down. The new GNOME session manager will just kill all running
programs without asking. This is very dangerous and will certainly
affect people who (maybe unconsciously) still rely on the old behavior.

Regarding gedit, it is one of the few programs that can block session
shutdown with the new session manager, and it seems to do this
incorrectly, by the way. With the old session manager, it used to work
well, as far as I remember.

Revision history for this message
mimoklepes (mimoklepes) wrote :

I don't see how this could be low priority. For me this is a deal-breaker and will probably force me to downgrade to 8.04. All running programs are just killed on logout, thus for example:

Liferea doesn't remember which feed items I've already read.
Amarok doesn't remember current playlist.

These are not very dangerous cases (though highly annoying), but for some apps this could mean some really serious data loss.

Revision history for this message
Don Cristóbal (doncristobal) wrote :

I agree: This bug _must not_ remain low priority!
I've just stepped into the trap, thinking "ah nice, since I use gnome, i can happily log out without checking for unsaved work"... and there i was, trying to recover my openoffice document. If the feature had never been there, you could convince me that it's ok if people have to pay attention themselves. But as it used to work, it is highly dangerous!

Please fix it! Thanks to anyone who does something :-)

Revision history for this message
drieteenmeeuw (drieteenmeeuw) wrote :

Same here on fully up-to-date Ub8.10. A rather annoying feature, especially since I tend to work with about 4-6 work spaces each with a number of open applications...

Revision history for this message
mipper (mipper) wrote :

I can only add my support to the people who think this bug should be of high importance, nay critical!

I cannot conceive of how anyone can believe that just killing open processes without any prompt to save outstanding data on shutdown could ever be acceptable to end users. Spending 2 hours working on a complicated spreadsheet which then gets lost if I forget it's open is plain crazy.

If you want to want to avoid swathes of new users taking up Linux instead of certain other operating systems I could mention then carry on camping. It only takes the above scenario to happen once and you've lost that user for life. Trust me, I've seen it happen.

Revision history for this message
mipper (mipper) wrote :

Interesting link about both problems I currently have with log out functionality including this one.

http://np237.livejournal.com/22014.html

Changed in gnome-session:
status: New → Fix Released
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