Re: [gthumb-list] Help system not working

[Paolo Bacchilega <paolo bacchilega libero it>]

Il 07/05/2012 03:45, Ronald F. Guilmette ha scritto:
> 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.

show_help_dialog function in gthumb/gtk-utils.c


- Paolo