[gthumb-list] Gthumb help system versus FreeBSD -- some progress made

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

In message <34211 1336432318 tristatelogic com>, you wrote:

> OK, so I installed yelp.  It's presence is making no apparent difference.
>
> I'm still getting the little pop-up error when trying to access the gthumb hel
> p stuff:
>
>       Could not display help
>       Operation not supported
>
> How can I debug this further?
>
> I'm guessing that I'll need to recompile and reinstall libgtk with -g and then
> see (in GDB) what the devil it thinks it is doing...


In lieu of any further advice from anybody here, I did in fact end up
recompiling and reinstalling both gtk and also glib (which includes libgio),
both with -g and no stripping.

After that, I put gthumb into gdb and then the real fun began.

I won't bore you all with all of the gory details.  Just suffice it to
say that I descended down into the deep bowels of glib/libgio and into a
twisty maze of little functions, all utterly undocumented, as far as
I can tell.  (WTF ever happened to traditional man pages??  It would have
been Nice if the developers of all this stuff would have at least written
down the functionality that is supposed to be provided by these various
library function in at least _some_ form.  But alas it seems that documenting
what you've done is not high on the agenda in the Gnome world view.)

So anyway, after some time rooting around on my hands and knees in the
dark through all of the relevant library source code, I came up with a
first-cut theory that the missing ingredient (necessary to make gthumb's
help sybsystem work) might perhaps be a file called "mimeapps.list"
that ought to be installed in one of more of the following directories:

        /usr/local/share/applications
        /usr/share/applications
        ~/.local/share/applications

I wanted to make a fix that would work for _all_ user accounts on this
system, so quite obviously I was not inclined to create or to diddle
the (non-existant) file called ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list.

Also, there doesn't seem to be any such directory as /usr/share/applications
on my system here, so I passed that one by also.

There was however already a /usr/local/share/applications directory on my
system, so I decided to work with that.  It already contained a substantial
number of *.desktop files, but it contained no mimeapps.list file, so I
set myself to creating one.  But what should go in it?  What's the proper
format of stuff that goes in that file?  Here again, a man page would have
been rather helpful, but one was nowhere to be found.

But Google is my friend, and after some more stumbling around in the dark
I found this page:

    https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Default_Applications

which went a long way to clarifying for me what sort of stuff I needed to
put into my shiny new /usr/local/share/applications/mimeapps.list, to wit:

        [Added Associations]
        x-scheme-handler/ghelp=yelp.desktop

Creating that file and sticking those two lines into it did make quite
a difference.  Now (unlike before) hen I click on Help->Contents in gthumb,
a new window pops up (which I'm guessing is created by this yelp thing).

That's the good news.

The bad news is that this new pop-up window is apparently implementing a
"Help Browser" for _all_ of Gnome.  This was rather different than what I
was expecting and/or hoping for.  More to the point, clicking on the
"GNOME Applications" button only results in me being informed that there
were "No documents or subcategories found."

Sigh.  Obviously, I have yet more rooting around in the dark to do before
I can finally and at long last gaze upon even one gthumb help page.

Wish me luck.


Regards,
rfg


P.S.  Yes, at some appropriate juncture I shall duly inform the official
FreeBSD gthumb port maintainer of all of the above, along with my strong
suggestions that the gthumb install process be enhanced (a) to have yelp
as a dependency and also (b) to include a step that will create and/or
diddle the /usr/local/share/applications/mimeapps.list file as indicated
above.

P.P.S.  It may perhaps be the case that all of my troubles are an outgrowth
of the fact that I have never installed (or previously found any real need
to install) the whole of what is called "Gnome".  I just install individual
applications, when and as I find I need them, all via the standard FreeBSD
port installation process.

Other than getting applications (like gthumb) to Do The Right Thing, I have
no real need for Gnome or for any other fancy-schmancy desktop environment,
thank you very much.  I have a favorite (and simple) X window manager that
I use and (thus) I really don't need all of that extra baggage or complexity
that gets dragged in when one elects to use, e.g. either GNOME or KDE or
whatever.

But perhaps the price I pay for not going with the whole of the Gnome flow
is that stuff like gthumb will break, inexplicably, and due to factors that
no official Gnome documentation anywhere would shed any helpful light on.