Bug#550069: kde: Eratic behavior of arrow key in file selector

[Bruno <bruno.vasselle@laposte.net>]

Package: kde
Version: 3.5.10
Severity: important


KDE reports 3.5.10, but it seems it's a mix 3.5.9/3.5.10, as synaptic rather
reports 3.5.9. Here is the description:

Keyboard navigation with arrow keys into the KDE file selector follows a pretty 
strange algorithm. "Up" and "Down" keys do sometimes select the "Previous" and
"Next" file in the list, but sometimes skip some of them and jumps directely 
a few files before or after. This looks like bug #456933 reported for 
konqueror.

The next/previous algorithm seems to be related to the length of the filenames.
Create a directory with the following files:
  a
  b1234
  c
  d123
  e
  f1
  g1234
  h12345678901
  i1234
  j12345678901
  z

then within kate invoke "Open file", and navigate with keyboard into the file 
list portion, starting with file "a". If you press "Down" again and again, 
you'll get:
  a > c > d > e > f > g > i > j > z
"b" and "h" are skipped, which are sensibly longer than "a" and "g". But "j" is 
not, suprisingly.

Once at "z", press "Up" again and again, you'll get:
  z < i < g < f < e < d < c < a
Here, "j", "h" and "b" are skipped.

Note that changing the font to fixed/monospace does not change anything, though
I suspected it would.

Well, I'd be really interested in knowing the development process that lead
to such a strange behavior. That's really puzzling.

Yours for more information.

Bruno


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0.3
  APT prefers proposed-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'proposed-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-2-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash