Bug#807792: libgtk-3-0: scrollbars disappear after a while

[Christoph Anton Mitterer]

Control: retitle -1 make overlay scrollbars more easily system-widely configurable and/or change the default
Control: severity -1 wishlist

On Sun, 2015-12-13 at 16:42 +0100, Michael Biebl wrote:
> The overlay scrollbars are a feature
Hmm I've actually stumbled over that when googling around, but it
seemed to be an unity thing only... so I didn't dig much deeper.

> > IMHO, that bug is important, since it makes scrollbars by itself
> > in one half useless, namely showing where one is right now in the
> > scrolled content.
> Well, I don't agree on the severity, but whatever.
Well severity is always also based on personal reception... my reason
here was: GTK is a gui toolkit, that "feature" seems to make on of the
core GUI elements pretty useless.
It's as if they'd hide any buttons where one doesn't move the mouse
(with the weird reason, that right now one couldn't click on them
anyway).

But feel just free to reduce the severity... actually I think if
upstream makes such strange features default, it should be more easily
configurable (if Debian doesn't go the more sane and conservative way,
changing upstreams decision to what has been done and proven for
decades.
So I change this a wishlist.


> If you don't like the overlay feature, you can use
> GTK_OVERLAY_SCROLLING=0 evince
What do you think would be the most appropriate place to set that?
/etc/X11/Xsession.d for system wide and ~/.xsessionrc for per-user?
Or rather xinitrc?

I don't think it should be one of gnome/cinnamon/etc's RC files.


> There might even be a .ini setting, but I'm too lazy to look that.
> Shouldn't be hard to find.
Thanks for the hint.
Unfortunately I couldn't find anything about a corresponding .ini
setting, which would have actually been much better than setting
another envvar...
It even seems that the above may not be enough:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GTK%2B#Disable_overlay_scrollbars
indicates one would also need to change the CSS (though that may be
theme related, as these dotted indicators don't appear here at all).



As for the wishlist:
Dear maintainers,
it has been the normal and proven behaviour for... well ever since GUIs
exist, that elements like scrollbars don't just disappear, even though
there *is* scrollable content.
If upstream thinks this is fancy, fine, but I'd consider that feature
rather a regression.
It's likely to confuse users and obstructs them in interaction with the
GUI (for the reasons I've mentioned in the previous mails in that
email).

I think Debian should either overrule that default, giving users the
standard behaviour, one gets (AFAICS) from any other toolkit.
Or alternatively (I you don't want to change the defaults, please, make
it more easily configurable.
I really did search for it for quite a while and - as mentioned above -
even stumble over the overlay scrollbar "feature", but it didn't really
appear to what's happening here.

Therefore, I'd think about a debconf question here. libgtk anyway pulls
in countless other deps, one more doesn't surely harm, and even though
it's not extremely common, there are several library packages (even
core) that use debconf.

To the least, this should be documented in README.Debian.


Thanks,
Chris.
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