[pygtk] Need help trying to be a good GNOME application...

[Don Allingham]

Due to the demands of working for a startup company, I've been away from 
this list for quite a while. I've been trying to get caught up on the 
work needed for the GRAMPS project, and I could use some help on being a 
good GNOME application using pygtk/gnome-python.

Because GRAMPS is a genealogy program, it is used not only at your 
typical hacker, but also by your Aunt Martha. To make things as easy for 
the Linux newbie as possible, we want to act the way a GNOME program is 
supposed to act. In the process, we've encountered a few problems that 
we hope someone could help us with.

1) It looks like the "Recent Documents" option discussed by Alex Roitman
    is not something available for us at this time. This is somewhat
    disappointing, since while our users are expecting this to work,
    GNOME does not give us a method of supporting this, which is odd
    since the GNOME project made a big splash about this at the 2.6
    release. Are there any python implementations of handling this
    outside of wrapping libegg ourselves?

2) It seems that the GnomeApp interface is being replaced by
    GtkUIManger. However, glade does not support this. I've looked at the
    alternate builder (can't remember its name off the top of my head),
    but it did not seem to support GNOME widgets, such as the Canvas.
    Any suggestions on what to do here?

3) What is the appropriate way to find the icon associated with a MIME
    type? gnome-vfs can get us the root name (e.g. i-directory), but not
    the full path. There is a nice routine to return the full path to
    the icon of an application, but not a mime-type. Right now, we a have
    python implementation that tries to convert a mime-type to a
    filename by trying to querying GCONF for the current theme, trying to
    convert that to a path, and trying to convert the mime type to a
    file name. Is there an easier way?

TIA,

Don