Direction of the panel in RTL languages

["yaniv abir" <yanivabir gmail com>]

Hello everybody,
I am a user of GNOME as shipped in Ubuntu edgy, with the Hebrew locale. I also contributed a little bit to the Hebrew GNOME translation, and to the translation of Ubuntu.

I'm writing to call your attention to a bug in the way the gnome panel (especially the top one, in the standard layout) is shown in locales for RTL languages. The menu's are kept on the left, as in LTR languages, and so while all entries are aligned to the right  (as they should be) and the arrows for sub-menus point the the left (as they should do in RTL languages) the sub menus open to the right of the main menu - as there is no room on the left. To solve this the panel should be horizontally flipped with RTL locales, 
i.e. menus on the right of the panel, the clock and other applets on the left.

There is a bug about this (149886 in GNOME, which 
49898 in Ubuntu and 108111 in Fedora are linked to), which was filed back in 2004, developed a discussion, but was abandoned around 2.12 (the target for it is 
2.14). This is a major bug for the {any RTL language} speaking newbie - as the GNOME panel is one of the first things the user sees, such an inconsistency might deter him from using GNOME.

I hope this problem could be solved quickly for the sake of users such as myself,
Thank you very much,

Yaniv Abir