Debian Jessie, standalone OpenBox.

Get this message in terminal whenever i click on Search in Synaptic Package Manager. Both, when i launch it from the OpenBox Menu (where it opens a terminal and i have to authenticate as root), and when i launch it from the terminal with sudo (i am a sudoer). It is nothing critical as everything works just fine as far as i can tell but it gives me a nagging feeling at the back of my head that i am doing something wrong. I have installed gtk2-engines, even some of those gir12 polkits for good measure but this annoyance won't go away.

Tip for newbies trying out a minimal install: Don't shy away from installing Synaptic, it is indispensible for installing packages without errors and meeting all dependencies. Just installed Xfe from it and it rocks. Built-in text-editor and image viewer too, and yet so featherweight! Beats me why some people still sing paeans to Thunar and Nautilus.

gtk warnings and even errors are very common.
you might find that you get different errors when you change your gtk theme, and with different applications.
as long as they're only gtk errors, and your system works otherwise, and you're not a gtk theme developer... ignore them.

Update: Decided to splurge and installed gksu in addition to sudo after a minimal install. Opened Synaptic with this time..gksu was probably the "transient parent" the poor thing was looking for.

Greetings,

I really do not think that the error

Is related to the Synaptic Package manager, but rather has to do with the zenity gui it is running on.

One really shabby to fix this problem is to terminate every reference to zenity with a redirection of standard error.

Thank the gods we can eliminate meaningless messages!

Maybe it means something? Someone should tell us...

Flint

synaptic is NOT a zenity script!!!

also, i get the same message (it's not even a warning) when i run synaptic without superuser privileges, but not with e.g. sudo. just saying.

Greetings,

But it is the same error message that zenity is giving (try the code below):
So the conclusion is that zenity and synaptic are somehow related. I believe that this is in their gui interface.

Regards,

Flintiii

related, yes.
they both use gtk. it is a gtk-message we are talking about.
but synaptic still doesn't use zenity.

well, I believe that this one is in your gui interface.
(sorry, no offense, just a play on words i couldn't resist)

in the gtk toolkit when poping up a dialog you have the option of supplying a parent window ( the 'transient for..' bit), this helps window mangers to keep the dialog and main windows in sync and keeps the dialog box on top of the main window ( presuming the dialog is supposed to be always above the main window ), presumably the gtk devs meant for this to become compulsory at some point but never gotbaround to it, it's just a warning and can be safely ignored, there are many such in gtk, it woud be nice if you could turn off gtk warnings globaly but you can't.

At Debian 9.3.0 with Gnome, if you open a terminal and launch a gtk program -ej. calibre- the warning exist: "GtkDialog mapped without a transient parent. This is discouraged."


Ok, but IF you launch Gnome in Wayland, you open a terminal and launch again gtk program -calibre- the warning NOT exist.

I think that the warning is for transition propoues.

Bye, enjoy you day.

The posts were good pointers to resolving the issue. It might be a warning but I, as a keen amateur developer, will pursue the matter in my own code. It will teach me more about gtk dev.