GNOME

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.

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.