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Package: x11-apps
Version: 7.3+4
Severity: critical
Justification: causes serious data loss
In gnome, without glipper running, the regular clipboard suffers from a
fatal flaw that is enormously irritating: when you quit an application,
the contents of the paste buffer disappear.
For example, without glipper running, I open openoffice.org writer and
use it like I would use MS Word or something. I cut some text from
one document. Then I close the window, naturally saving of course, and
go and double-click on an oowriter file icon in a nautilus folder of a
different document. That document opens up. But I can't paste - the
clipboard contents vanished, making me lose my important text to a void
of oblivion. I am lucky that I had a backup copy of the original file,
and I was able to track down my gibberish notes for episode 9.
This is true of any application. For example, (without glipper running),
I have an Iceweasel and a gnome-terminal window open. I select the URL
from the location bar in Iceweasel, ctl-c to copy or copy from the edit
menu, then go to the terminal window. At that point I can right-click
in the terminal and choose paste, the URL pastes okay. But if I close
Iceweasel, then I can no longer choose paste in the terminal window --
the clipboard contents have vanished.
With glipper running in the panel, the gnome clipboard contents are
preserved after the source application has quit, and I can paste them
like I would expect using the paste command. But glipper is not a
required package for gnome, and it alters the way the normal paste
buffer behaves.
Using mouse selection + right/left or center click behaves exactly
the same way. When the source application quits, the buffer contents
are gone. I am assuming that by default gnome uses xclipboard for
the copy/paste functions in menus (when glipper is not installed.)
This is NOT how "regular computers" work, and would be a show stopper
for a novice user. As long as the window system is running, the
clipboard contents should be preserved, whether or not I close any
particular window.
Mark
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0
APT prefers stable
APT policy: (990, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-maggie-8 (SMP w/2 CPU cores; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Versions of packages x11-apps depends on:
ii cpp 4:4.3.2-2 The GNU C preprocessor (cpp)
ii libc6 2.7-18 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii libice6 2:1.0.4-1 X11 Inter-Client Exchange library
ii libpng12-0 1.2.27-2 PNG library - runtime
ii libsm6 2:1.0.3-2 X11 Session Management library
ii libx11-6 2:1.1.5-2 X11 client-side library
ii libxaw7 2:1.0.4-2 X11 Athena Widget library
ii libxcursor1 1:1.1.9-1 X cursor management library
ii libxext6 2:1.0.4-1 X11 miscellaneous extension librar
ii libxft2 2.1.12-3 FreeType-based font drawing librar
ii libxkbfile1 1:1.0.5-1 X11 keyboard file manipulation lib
ii libxmu6 2:1.0.4-1 X11 miscellaneous utility library
ii libxmuu1 2:1.0.4-1 X11 miscellaneous micro-utility li
ii libxrender1 1:0.9.4-2 X Rendering Extension client libra
ii libxt6 1:1.0.5-3 X11 toolkit intrinsics library
ii x11-common 1:7.3+18 X Window System (X.Org) infrastruc
x11-apps recommends no packages.
Versions of packages x11-apps suggests:
pn mesa-utils <none> (no description available)
-- no debconf information
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