Re: Anjuta

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

Thanks for your analysis Nuba.  

Basically the problem is originated by two wrong assumptions from the
early days:

	* gnome was a single tarball ;-)

	* we were young and restless

> But as far as I know, *almost* all of the packages install there
> pixmaps and help files in the gnome-data dir (of course, that
> could be because I haven't tried any local installation).

Which packages would that be?   If there are many of those, we should
work towards fixing them, because it is a broken scenario.

This is broken in many areas:

	people who use /opt/ setups (/opt/gnome-libs, /opt/gnumeric,
	/opt/...)

	People who compile applications on their home directories, or
	have development setups in a separate place than their
	"stable" GNOME foundation.

So we should make sure we fix those applications.  

> The function I use is:
> 
> full_path = gnome_pixmap_file (short_path);

This function is even worse.  Again, a rookie mistake we did in the
early days.  The problem with gnome_XXX_file compared to
gnome_unconditional_XXX_file is that XXX looks up in the GNOMEDIR
directory for the file which might lead to unexepcted behaviour. 

I strongly recommend against using those API calls. 

> This function apparently prefixes gnome pixmap dir to the
> short_path. As far as the name of this function is concerned, it
> looks like a standard utility to find pixmaps for gnome applications
> and not something that is reserved for gnome libs only.

It is useful for locating "standard" pixmaps (and honestly, there are
very few of those, and given that applications tend to install in
different locations, an app should probably not *depend* on this to
work out).

> Also consider the pixmap path given in the menu
> UIINFO struct for creating menubar. The path
> given there is relative to the gnome pixmap dir,
> unless, of course we give absolute paths there
> which is inherenly very difficult, if not impossible,
> to provide to the static data structures used for
> UIINFO structs.

Yes, a problem that we are now addressing in Bonobo UI XML.  I
honestly do not like the UIINFO anymore, it was good in its day, but
now the Bonobo stuff provides the right solution.  A bit cumbersome to
use sometimes, but the right thing to do.

If anything, we could sprinkle some sugar into the problem

Best wishes,
Miguel.