Bug#252148: zenity is S L O W

[giacomo boffi]

Package: zenity
Version: 2.6.2-2
Severity: important

disclaimer: zenity is  S  L  O  W  on *my* system
            this is, imho, an "important" bug, as it severely detracts
	    to the usability of the package

please look at the attached little benchmark, you can see that
instantiating a zenity dialog takes MORE than 10 times the cpu needed
to load xemacs, execute its startup files, to instantiate a fully
decorated (menus, toolbars, pixmaps) frame and to close it, and what's
more important, it takes more than FIVE seconds of wall clock

ps: the figures below are recorded after repeated executions of zenity, to
have a chance that the zillion libs it depends are cached at the moment
of the benchmark

------------------------------------------------------------------------
% echo $LISTA
FALSE ctwm FALSE gwm FALSE ion2 FALSE metacity FALSE pwm2 FALSE vtwm
TRUE twm
% echo $height
330
% time zenity --height=$height --list --radiolist \
              --column Run --column window\ manager $LISTA
twm

real    0m6.938s
user    0m5.610s
sys     0m0.310s
% time xemacs -f save-buffers-kill-emacs

real    0m0.652s
user    0m0.490s
sys     0m0.020s
% 
------------------------------------------------------------------------

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.4.18-bf2.4
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C

Versions of packages zenity depends on:
ii  libart-2.0-2              2.3.16-5       Library of functions for 2D graphi
ii  libatk1.0-0               1.6.1-2        The ATK accessibility toolkit
ii  libc6                     2.3.2.ds1-13   GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii  libglade2-0               1:2.4.0-1      Library to load .glade files at ru
ii  libglib2.0-0              2.4.1-2        The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgnomecanvas2-0         2.6.1.1-2      A powerful object-oriented display
ii  libgtk2.0-0               2.4.1-4        The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  libpango1.0-0             1.4.0-3        Layout and rendering of internatio
ii  libpopt0                  1.7-4          lib for parsing cmdline parameters
ii  libx11-6                  4.3.0.dfsg.1-4 X Window System protocol client li
ii  libxml2                   2.6.10-2       GNOME XML library
ii  scrollkeeper              0.3.14-8       A free electronic cataloging syste
ii  xlibs                     4.3.0.dfsg.1-4 X Window System client libraries m
ii  zlib1g                    1:1.2.1.1-3    compression library - runtime

-- no debconf information