Re: [gthumb-list] Help system not working

["Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg tristatelogic com>]

I am still attempting to overcome what I consider a very serious bit of
broken-ness of gthumb on FreeBSD, and I sure would appreciate some help.

As I previously reported, the help system is entirely non-functioning on
FreeBSD.  If one clicks on the Help button along the top row, and then clicks
on either "Contents" or on "Keyboard Shortcuts" (or if one simply hits
the F1 key) the result are the same.  A little dialog box pops up that says:

        Could not display help
        Operation not supported

(and then these is an "OK" button to dismiss this little error pop-up).

Given that gthumb appears to have no formal man page and also, apparently,
little if any external documentation packaged with it, the non-functioning
of the help system leavse the user utterly without guidance as to how to
properly use this fine tool.

I tried to begin the process of debugging this issue, but I found that
I could not get very far, undoubtely due to my abundant ignorance.  I started
by trying to find the exact spot in the gthumb source code where this little
pop-up box would be thrown up, but I failed, utterly, to find the spot
in question.  I've grepped the sources for the string "Could not display help"
but was only able to find it in numerous internationalization/translation
files, and none of these gave me any hints or got me any closer to finding
the spot in the code where the error pop-up gets displayed.  (If I can just
find that spot, then maybe I will be able to put gthumb in gdb and see what
the devil is actually going on, and why this failure occurs.

Realizing that "Operation not supported" is just the verbose textual version
of the standard system error code EOPNOTSUPP, I deduced that perhaps when
gthumb displays this error it is just because some file it wants is missing
from where it ought to be, and that the pop-up is just the end result of
gthumb getting EOPNOTSUPP back from some system call, e.g. open().  Continuing
along that train of thought, I thought that perhaps running gthumb under
truss (aka "strace" for you Linux folks) would show me exactly what the
problems was being caused by.  Alas, when I tried that... running gthumb
under truss, after truss printed a slew of initial trace messages (but
before I could click on Help->Contents) the combination of truss and
gthumb totally locked up X on my system (and repeatably so).  I had to
exit from and then restart X just to get my system back to something
approaching normal.

I'm only relating all of these tales of woe in the hopes that someone
(Paolo?) m,ay take pity on me and point me to the place(s) in the sources
where the message "Could not display help" might be displayed in a little
pop-up window.  I am determined to try to fix this problem, and thaty info
would help a lot.


Regards,
rfg