[Nautilus-list] fixing the fact that updating menus takes a lot of time

[Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com>]

On Thursday, June 14, 2001, at 08:38  AM, Alex Larsson wrote:

> The problem is not the I/O. The problem is that each view of that
> directory gets a lot of file_changed signals, which leads to every view
> updating it's menus. Due to braindeadness in Bobobo, updating the menus
> takes a lot of time, so performance drops rapidly as you get more views
> displaying the directory.
>
> For more info on this, see my mail on 12 Jun with subject
> "Re: [Nautilus-list] hidden files bug".

Here's my thinking on this.

I want to build a layer on top of Bonobo (probably in 
eel-bonobo-extensions.[ch] or in libnautilus-private) that keeps track of 
the UI items and their state in some fast data structure, like a hash 
table. Then, when the menu update is done, we'll build the appropriate XML 
and send a single piece of XML to Bonobo for changes in the component's 
menus and nothing at all if nothing changed.

Before now I resisted doing this because I thought that what Alex calls 
the "branddeadness" in Bonobo would eventually get fixed. And because this 
problem would affect any other substantial Bonobo component and program. 
But now that it's clear I need to do it, it should be pretty easy to do.

I'm not sure when I'll get around to this. If someone is interested in 
helping I'd be happy to talk about the idea in more detail.

    -- Darin