MRU list for collections is now missing/useless

[ssokolow]

Setup (please complete the following information):

• Distribution: Flatpak (on Kubuntu)
• Distribution release: 24.04 LTS
• Geeqie version [geeqie --version]: Geeqie 2.6 GTK3 (Flatpak commit 1d0b90108ba7bb4aa9870a34b49b47a6a822597f5d605f4afa862f2b559b073e)

Describe the bug

Since the last Flatpak update, my MRU list for collections vanished and the "Open recent file..." option which I assume is meant to replace it does show a list of collections... but choosing one tries to open it as an image and fails.

To reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

Problem A:

1. Click "File"
   ...where's the submenu?

Problem B:

1. Click "File"
2. Click "Open recent file..."
3. Double-click a visible collection
   ...why is Geeqie navigated to my collections folder and not opening the collection?

Expected behavior

My MRU list should be there and ready to access as usual.

Additional context

Even if this were working as appears intended, it's still a de facto data loss bug unless I go into my nightly backups and manually transcribe my MRU list's contents into whatever new format Geeqie now expects.

It's getting late but, in the morning, I'll probably do the "Flatpak downgrade and pin" dance that I use whenever an Inkscape update introduces a new crash bug.

[caclark]

A .gqv file is a text file containing a list of the images in that collection.

For example, if you navigate to the Collections folder, the .gqv files are interpreted as a file and not as a Collection - the image pane shows a montage of the files within the Collection.

If you use File/Open Recent, the Collection file is interpreted as just a file and not a Collection - that is a bug.

If you wish to open a Collection, use File/Open Collection which lists all the Collection files in the defined Collection folder. That dialog can be sorted by modification time.

But yes, when opened via Open Recent, .gqv files should be opened as a Collection and not as a file. In the meantime use File/Open Collection.

[A deficit with the implemented method is that it is expected that Collection files are in the directory defined by Geeqie and not in various places.]

[ssokolow]

I'm well aware what a .gqv file is. One of the projects I have on the back burner is to reimplement the bits of Geeqie that I actually use in PyQt so I can incorporate them into a custom image databasing utility.

(In fact, the .gqv loader is the main thing I have written... and discovered that, even when clamped to a single QThreadPool thread to prevent thrashing on rotating drives (pending a proper userland I/O scheduler), QImage loaded thumbnails about twice as fast as whatever Geeqie was doing at the time.)

The proposed solution still takes more clicks and is more awkward. If there's no will to provide a traditional MRU menu, I'll probably just pin Geeqie 2.5 like I did with 1.0 back when 1.1 introduced a "crash on attempt to open some of my collections" bug and expedite getting my replacement complete enough to be usable.