Looking at the change notes for zenity, no mention of this option being removed is made. It was introduced in version 2.15.1 (2006-03-23) and no other mention has been made of it since. Further looking through the actual commits, I see that commit f17a8bfc875fada1a79e42f6f07119e91a6955f4 on 2021-02-10 by Logan Rathbone unceremoniously removed the option without mentioning it at all (the commit comment: "entry, fileselection: make build against gtk4"). I'm going to make an uneducated guess and assume that the gtk4 system dialog provides the functionality by default, so he decided the option was no longer needed?

Regardless, it is still needed for my purposes. I'd rather not just go without, since it is a very useful feature that helps prevent people from making dumb mistakes. The question is, how? This works perfectly fine with any version prior to the zenity v3.90.0 release, which was created on January 25, 2023. I'd argue they should re-add the option and just ignore it when present (assuming the new code always enables this behavior), just like they've done with other options that they've deprecated in the past, since this is clearly breaking behavior... of course, they've already made the release, so its a bit late for that.

I fully agree.
However there will be a (hopefully) short period were GCS mostly won't work on linux.
You can open and view existing sheets but you cannot modify or create new ones.
Maybe a simple workaround and retry without the option in case of exit code 255?

Perhaps. Since you have a system with the new version of Zenity, could you try that approach out and see if it is workable?

I hacked this together and it seems to be working. The screen flickers a bit and then the save dialog appears correctly. The flicker probably comes from the modal dialog handling - creating a window and closing it after the save dialog finishes.

I will update my PR - to give you an idea of the required changes.

I was thinking of something slightly different. Essentially running zenity --help-file-selection and looking for the overwrite option in the output. If it has it, include it in the command line options, if not, omit it, then run as normal. This should avoid any flicker and also not run the risk of the modal being presented twice for inexplicable reasons.

I was going to implement this approach, but then found that -- at least on my distribution -- there is no option for me to update to the broken version of zenity. I looked at the repo, but have no clue how I'd actually build it, not seeing a makefile or other artifacts I'm familiar with.

If you can test it, I'm happy to implement the change I suggested and put it up for you to try out.

That is probably way better than what I hacked together with my very limited go knowledge :-)
Just send it over, I will test it.
Thank you!

OK, give the code in #32 a try. You can grab it from the fix-zenity branch.

Tested "Save As" for existing characters and the normal "Save" dialog for new characters.
Both work fine now. Thank you!

Excellent. I'll close this one out and merge the other. Thanks for testing this.

👍
Thank you!