Need some help improving an issue report.
I think that it was insufficiently isolated, which made it misdiagnosed in triage.
It was originally filed as a bug report but triaged into a Feature Request. Since it falls into the “yeah, that may be technically wrong but it is just a quirk” category, it falls off the radar as a GUI tweak feature request. Which is deprioritized because it has a virtually painless workaround (once you’re aware of it) … and further deprioritized as only a barrier for newbies.
What’s more, concurrent use has been anticipated in the near future (for several years). So the problem might just “go away” when that happens.
Back in 2022, I filed
0012640: Add better message when “Error message on Locked Database is not actionable”
I now think that I should have pushed back on the conversion to a Feature Request and insisted it is a bug.
That is because it is raising a CLI error dialog (which is a bizarre convolution in itself) for a GUI problem. And an appropriate GUI error dialog exists. So the error handler is choosing the wrong messaging.
(Images are hotlinked to their File: ‘image use’ MediaWiki page.)
It would seem more reasonable to see the “Error parsing arguments” error when trying to launch Gramps from the terminal command line while passing parameters.
But it might be that the desire to suppress the flash of the Manage Family Tree dialog sabotages the right handling. It causes the best Feedback and streamlined UX to be suppressed.
The user will eventually need to dismiss the (purely informational) warning dialog (that is mislabeled with ‘error’ instead of ‘warning’), select the File → Manage Family Trees, scroll to find the Tree that has a lock icon in the status colum, double-click that row to be presented with the “Break lock” Confirmation dialog.
So, why not just jump to that step? Show the Manahe Family Trees dialog, scroll to the the target row h highlight it, then show the “Break Lock” Confirmation dialog.
I wonder where this confusion of similar dialogs can be traced back to? Perhaps one came with the Preferences option to: reload the last Tree when Granps restarts?