FileChooser

Federico is bringing up the file chooser’s lack of speed again. Good.

The first step, IMHO, should be to get rid of reloading the folder
of widget mapping. It is wrong to do non-widget, expensive and externally-visible actions in a widget mapping handler. If someone
switches to another virtual screen and back (for example to peek at something),
do we really want to reload the folder? Do we lose the selections
in the process? If The Gimp wants that behaviour, I say it can
install a handler and trigger it itself.

Would things appear to be faster if we installed a single-shot
idle-handler that created a file chooser and threw it away?
(That would be a work-around more than a fix, of course.)

There is more to your item 7 than just performance, btw. It should
not stat() all those parent directories because it may not be allowed
to do so. If you just succeeded in stat(“/foo/bar/baz”) then
it should not be necessary to check that “/foo” and “/foo/bar” are
directories.

Nat is Crazy

Nat, that is crazy.
You are not exactly 25 years old anymore.

Ok, I have done worse, i.e., I have done 200 miles a couple of times.
That takes about 12 hours, all breaks included. Some things you ought
to know in advance:

  • Your route looks somewhat dangerous, traffic-wise. Wear something
    with screaming colours.
  • Your behind will be as sore as your jaw was recently.
  • Your ability to control various muscles you did not even know you
    had will be temporarily affected. Do not drive a car yourself for a day.
  • If you get wet, say around Quincy, the trip is not going to be
    any fun. You will end up with a mixture of water and road dirt thrown from your own wheels all over yourself. It will make an unpleasant sound on your teeth. (Been there, done that.)

On Bugs Reports

For entertainment purposes only:

Evidently someone dumped a feature request for Gnumeric on
comp.os.linux.advocacy and is mildly upset that after a year it has not been implemented.
(Not even an interesting feature, mind you.)

In my humble opinion that is like tattooing an Excel feature request on
your butt, flying off to Redmond and mooning the Microsoft campus on
a dark and rainy winter evening. That is likely to work, for sure.

Bugzilla might not be the world’s best bug reporting interface,
but it sure beats mailing lists and irc in terms on probability
of the bug report not being forgotten forever.