Bug#742211: zenity: --info destroys X11 primary selection content, and does not document that either

[Andreas Mohr]

Package: zenity
Version: 3.8.0-1
Severity: important
Justification: data loss

Dear Maintainer,

   * What led up to the situation?

Select something with left mouse key,
then run e.g.
    sleep 10 && /usr/bin/zenity --info --text foobar
or
    sleep 10 && /usr/bin/zenity --error --text foobar

   * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
     ineffective)?
   * What was the outcome of this action?

Witness your primary selection getting zilched, nullified
as soon as zenity is launched, on this environment and some others
(bug discovered on u1204LTS).

   * What outcome did you expect instead?

Middle mouse button ought to still have been able to re-paste
the left-button-copied content, just like it *does work* for
    sleep 10 && /usr/bin/zenity --entry  (!!)
    sleep 10 && /usr/bin/zenity --file-selection  (!!)
    sleep 10 && /usr/bin/kdialog --msgbox foobar  (4:4.11.3-1)



Fooled once, fooled twice, but then I got wise ;)


Severity important since it's *very* annoying
to lose copy&paste content of possibly already vanished or forgotten
origin content
(this problem does not apply to the case of windows having been closed though
since it appears their selection is gone anyway),
seemingly without any indication by zenity
on why this is the case, and why for *certain* zenity modes only
(so, this problem should either be fixed, or properly documented).

Anyway, in my case it was an annoyance at least a couple times already
when losing mouse selection content midstream
due to having chosen to use zenity as a cron-based reminder message launcher...

Thanks a lot for your work,

Andreas Mohr

-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 3.12.0-rc2+
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages zenity depends on:
ii  libc6               2.17-3
ii  libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0  2.28.2-1
ii  libglib2.0-0        2.38.2-5
ii  libgtk-3-0          3.10.7-1
ii  libnotify4          0.7.4-1
ii  libpango-1.0-0      1.36.0-1+b1
ii  libwebkitgtk-3.0-0  2.2.5-1
ii  libx11-6            2:1.6.0-1
ii  zenity-common       3.8.0-1

zenity recommends no packages.

zenity suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information

-- debsums errors found:
sh: 1: /usr/sbin/dpkg-divert: not found