I maintain a reasonably popular app called Asunder. This app has in its preferences a GtkFileChooserButton, and implementation of the (supposedly) interface GtkFileChooser.

I’ve been getting bug reports about the selected directory not being saved when you save the preferences and looked into it again today. I could hardly believe what I found.

If I double-click on the directory I want selected and click “Open”, what I get looks like this:

But gtk_file_chooser_get_filename() returns.. “/home/andrew”. I dug and dug through my code and the GTK reference looking for an explanation, but found none. After experimenting some more I found the problem:

This only happens if I double-click on the directory I want (“temp” in this case). If instead I single-click on the directory I want – I get it. Using other GtkFileChooser getters doesn’t fix anything. So this is not a bug in my code (in fact I don’t think I could hack around this even if I wanted to), this is probably some retard deciding that his 0.001% use case is more important design-wise than everyone else who uses GTK.

I guess that’s just the way things are in a lot of open source. Instead of being brushed aside because you’re not the highest-paying customer your needs are brushed aside because they aren’t matching someone else’s vision.

There’s a chance that this is an honest bug (not a design decision), but how is one to know for sure? I mean look at what they’ve done to KDE4 and Gnome3.. my faith in open source is starting to waver.