The popup menuitem ordering bug for extensions

[Adam Plumb <adamplumb gmail com>]

hi all,

I work for the RabbitVCS project and I'm trying to track down and debug an issue that I'm having with my extension's menu items.  Basically, the issue is that menu items don't show up in the correct order, or in unpredictable order.  This manifests itself when you change the context menuitems on a regular basis like we do.  I wrote to this mailing list in february and included a simple python extension that displayed the behavior, but now I'm coming back with an extension written in C that displays the behavior.

The way the extension works is it creates a set of five menuitems (item0 through item4) and adds it to the extension group on the nautilus context menu. Every time a user clicks on a file it will recreate the menu but a random number generator will determine that some items will not be added.  This will cause us to create a "new" menu every time a new file is selected.

The expected behavior is that if some items don't appear they should show up like: item0 item2 item4 (1 and 3 are missing).  Unfortunately, what does happen is sometimes we get item2 item4 item0 or item4 item2 item0.  It is completely random and unpredictable.

So I've been looking in the nautilus source code, in the src/file-manager/fm-directory-view.c file specifically, trying to figure out where in the stack the menu is losing its ordering.  I found the real_update_menus function, and in turn found the reset_extension_actions_menu function, and when I print out the generated menu items, they show up in the correct order.  So I know it is something happening later than that.  But I'm at a loss as to where to look next or how to debug this.

I'm hoping for a couple possible outcomes from this email.

    1. That someone smarter or more informed than me will load my text extension, see the problem, and figure out how to fix it.
    2. That someone will take pity on me and give me some ideas for where I can look next.

I've attached my test extension.  You should be able to run "sh autogen.sh ; make ; make install" to install it.

Thanks!

Adam

Attachment: nautilus-menuorder-extension.tar.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data