Comment 7 for bug 534651

Thank you Chris, that was most insightful!

Having applied your methodology to my two problem folders, ~/Downloads and ~/Documents I get the following output for both:

attributes:
  metadata::emblems: []

Which I assume means that these folders have no emblems assigned to them? If so this is rather perplexing. Although this behaviour is itself somewhat confusing, since the error (?) emblem only appears when no other emblems (from the current icon theme) are applied. Once another extent emblem is assigned to the offending folders the (?) emblem does not appear.

If the behaviour that I am observing were the result of an 'orphaned' emblem assignment I would expect (a) that said 'orphan' emblem would be mentioned in the output of the above command and (b) that it would still appear, as any other emblem would, upon assignment of any additional emblems, possibly taking up a different position to accommodate the additional emblem.