Menu reordering does not work

[Juho Vuori]

gtk_menu_reorder_child does nothing on menus managed by application indicator. This is further demonstrated by the two attached C++ programs. Both create a window and a application indicator menu with two items in it and reorder the items. The other attaches the menu to the application indicator icon and the other to a widget on screen. In the first case, the menu gets wrongly rendered in the original ordering. In the second case, the menu gets properly rendered with the two items reordered.

The programs compile on ubuntu 12.04 with some necessary development packages installed:

g++ bugtest.cpp `pkg-config gtkmm-3.0 appindicator3-0.1 --cflags --libs` -o bugtest
g++ bugtest2.cpp `pkg-config gtkmm-3.0 appindicator3-0.1 --cflags --libs` -o bugtest2

Duplicate bug 1026791 also has a Python script to demonstrate the problem. <https://bugs.launchpad.net/libdbusmenu/+bug/1026791/+attachment/3228814/+files/testind.py>

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

Hey, thanks for the awesome test cases! I'm looking into this right now. Looks like it's client-side (libappindicator instead of indicator-application) because I can see via d-feet that the menu the test app exports over dbus hasn't changed.

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

This is because gtk_menu_reorder_child does not emit any signals. It just internally reorders its child list and then redraws itself. So to fix this, we'd need to add a new signal to GTK+ to notify us...

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

And the reason it works in bugtest2 is because it seems like the appmenu waits to create its representation of the menu until the next idle check, so it will see the reordered child list. But libappindicator creates it immediately, before the child list is reordered.

If you change bugtest2 to wait a bit before reordering like below, you'll see the bug there too:

Glib::signal_timeout().connect(sigc::ptr_fun(&timeout_cb), 3000);

So this is a generic problem. We could make it better in some corner cases by delaying until the next idle call, but that won't fix the underlying issue, which is that we don't get notified of reorders.

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

I reported this upstream to GTK+ (bug has been linked). We'll see what they say about it.