Thanks for splitting this up a little.  However, this patch is still very big.  Too big to be applied in one go.  Would it be possible to split it up further?

I did look at the menu code a bit, though.  Why is there a new file tmpmenu.py which contains large parts of menu.py?  Wouldn't it have been better to simply put it all in to menu.py?

In tmpmenu, ListMenu doesn't seem to be used for anything except as a base class for Menu, so it would seem a bit clearer for now to merge these classes.

In tmpmenu, build_menu_tree checks whether description is an instance of MenuNode.  AFAICT that is never the case.  All callers always pass a sequence of (string or None) as the description.

This is ment to be a first patch in a series of patches breaking my recent changes to skencil 0.7 into smaller more digestable pieces. It provides many changes to the gui infrastructure and also some new dialogs. The most visibile change is the inspector panel which bundles the line, fill and property dialogs. Changes in the dialog are now immediately applied to the drawing. However, this can be switched off. The modal color dialog is replaced by a color panel which is inspired by Next Steps color chooser. Colors can now be transfered between most dialogs
by drag and drop.
 
The patch is applied e.g. by

cd skencil-devel/
patch -p1 -l < ../base.patch
 
 
There are lots of problems and todos left over. To name only some:
 
- with the transition to pygtk 2.4 some problems with the fill panel appeared concerning gradients and hatching, also lots of warnings
 
- the property inspection card is quite unfinished
 
- the old color is not always set correctly in the color panel
 
- a drawing bug of the widget renderer (sometimes hidden widgets are drawn)
 
- clean up & documentation