Long menu fails in gnome 3.2 and question about design of global menu for gnome3

[GoogleCodeExporter]

My whole Gnome shall restarts when the menu is too long, that it's longer than 
screen. For expample GIMP. I need gimp for work. And I need global menu, 
because i'm using mac OS X too. So.
But i need global rolled out all the time, like in mac ... there is space for 
it on bar at the tom of my screen. Why it isn't there? Gimp has 3 levels menus 
and more, It's completly useless to click to roll menu. Why is this solution 
different from global menu for Unity or GNOME2? I hope, there is something I'll 
like more than this ... but where? I didn't find anything.
Can You help me please? I don't have time for develop my own global menu. Thx

I'm using GIT version and Archlinux + newst GNOME3.2 .
I haven't found any bug report on my computer. You can tell me, where is it, 
than I can send it, but I guess, this issue is on all computers.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by spena...@gmail.com on 4 Oct 2011 at 11:10

[GoogleCodeExporter]

the long menu problem is a bug in GNOME-Shell's menu system. I didn't have the 
time to write a test case and submit a bug to them; you may try.

And the reason it is as it is is because it is easier to make it like this, and 
takes less time to write the code. And GNOME SHELL already has this date/time 
label right in the middle of the toppanel. 

Original comment by rainwood...@gmail.com on 4 Oct 2011 at 1:40

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I think, that for move date/time applet we need only small patch. I guess it's 
easier to write it like it is, but there is enaugh space before date/time ... 
so it's posible for example with smaller font to do that.

I'm sorry, but even if we don't count the bug, in longer menus, You can't click 
all the items. Again for example GIMP. There is no space. Are You folowing my 
problem here? That's why I need global menu which you can display all the time 
on the top of the screen.

At least, You can do the submenu cascading, like in older GNOME. Or You can't?

Original comment by spena...@gmail.com on 4 Oct 2011 at 4:26

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I developed an alternative to the GlobalMenu extension. It is largely inspired 
by the original extension. I tried to keep the code simple. It is not as 
polished as the original extension, but it do the trick.

You can find it on my github account :
https://github.com/rledisez/MyGlobalMenu-romain.ledisez.net

Of course you must install the gnome3-globalmenu plugin for GTK.

For now, there is (at least) one bug. Sometimes, the menu is not displayed. It 
happens most of the time with nautilus. But this bug also affects the original 
extension. The globalmenu-manager returns <empty/>, so I think the bug is not 
really in the extensions but in the module.

A screenshot is attached.

Original comment by rom...@ledisez.net on 10 Dec 2011 at 2:07

Attachments:

• myglobalmenu.png

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Thanks! I like your extension better than the cheap one I made.

Do you have a mechanism to synchronize the top-level menu items, for example if 
the application dynamically adds/modifies an item, how do we make sure it shows 
up on the bar in the top panel? Many nasty programs do this(don't quite 
remember which. Evolution and GIMP?) That's part of the reason in my plugin the 
toplevel was also shown with drop down submenu. 

Most of the 0.7.x module code were dealing with this issue. I dislike how it 
was done (80% of code for 20% of feature, plus a lot of nasty hooks in the 
internal GTK) thus I left the code out when migrated to gnome3. 

A quick workaround I've been thinking is to set up a timeout event in the shell 
extension to query the content of the toplevel menu every 1 second and update 
when it's dirty. The timer shall be disabled when any submenu is shown, though. 

And I noticed the <empty/> bug sometime ago It's hard to track it down. I could 
not reliably reproduce it.  It may get something to do with the dbus service. 
You can also take a look at the dbus interfaces with D-Feet. Each application 
registers an anonymous dbus service and there is a GlobalMenu server service 
that acts as a gateway that forwards the extension's request to the 
applications. The windows are identified by their XWindow IDs.

Original comment by rainwood...@gmail.com on 10 Dec 2011 at 4:50