Caught at one hundred and twenty metres per second

There has been a lot of wedding going on Planet Debian and Planet GNOME over the last couple of months, almost like another meme. Or maybe I am just seeing more of it than I normally would because I am getting wed myself today.

The weather is cloudy, but it's not raining at the moment. For the time being, that's better than it has been for most couples over here who wed in spring and summer this year: it has been raining a lot, only the past few weekends have been really good. Obviously I still hope the sun comes through though.

People have been asking me a lot lately if I was nervous about it. I wasn't, and I'm not now either. I am rather excited however, a lot more than I had expected to be. I do not even know why really; just the idea of finally being joined together, and announcing it to everyone, I think. One thing I do know for sure, which is that I'll enjoy every moment.

Say Miguel, how cross platform is your .NET? Funny to see these applications mentioned underneath that banner.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Mono (or Novell), in fact I use and like the two applications that I've tried of the above — beagle and f-spot — very much. I just don't think that poster message is appropriate given the projects mentioned in the post.

Matthew, what kind of zebra are you and your wife driving then?

As I do not have feedreaders installed on every computer I use, and I'm too lazy to type in a few more characters, especially those outside the regular alphabetic range (and in addition I'm rather obsessive about having as few bookmarks as possible), I often visit Planet Debian by using Google.

Until recently, the first result when entering (without the quotes) "planet debian" was actually Debian Planet instead; but since a day or two, Planet Debian has overtaken it. Yay!

In an effort to convert a GnomeUIInfo based menu to a GtkUIManager one, I ran into a few annoying holes in the GTK+ documentation. First and foremost, the GTK+ tutorial itself is completely silent about GtkUIManager. Thankfully there is a migration whitepaper in the API reference, but it is still missing a lot of info too. For example, it does not say what the signature of the callbacks for various action entry types look like, let alone give an example how such callbacks could work. And the API reference for GtkActionGroup, which lists the various action entry types does not specify callback signatures either. Only on the GtkAction, GtkToggleAction and GtkRadioAction pages the signatures are listed. Likely because that is where the signals they connect to are documented, but neither from the migration paper nor from the GtkActionEntry page one can find this out.

Another issue is that there apparently is no replacement for the gnome_app_install_*_menu_hints calls. I'm not sure if such method should be in GTK+ itself, and if so, where it should go. Perhaps added to GtkStatusbar, or to a new higher level widget on top of GtkStatusbar (rather than an "application" type widget, I think). Or maybe simply added to gnome-app-helper as an interim solution.
But given the lack of such replacement method, a bigger problem is that no useful documentation is available on how to extract the tooltips from the gtk action entries and set them manually. The connect-proxy signal for GtkActionGroup does mention menuitem tooltips, but that's it. Perhaps I've simply missed a thorough explanation, but if there is one, shouldn't the migration paper link to it?

And finally, something which is more of a problem with the API itself, there's a lack of placeholder macros like the GNOMEUIINFO_MENU_*_ITEM ones. It's easy enough to replace them by fully written action entries, but all of a sudden menus cease to be translated as the translation strings are now part of the application rather than an underlying library. And worse, this is a setback in providing consistency, both for menu names, associated tooltip texts, and translations of both of these. (As for translations, there is a gtk_action_group_set_translate_func method, but it is not clear or explained how to use it)

Enough about this — back to coding.