Really not sure how to triage things like this... they are not all
that important (the app works anyway) but to people concerned with
a11y they are of critical importance. Ah, well, that's what the
keywords are for- they can find them and deal with them outside of the
normal priority/severity schema.

louie: 

I agree that right now bugs like this are of minimal importance to
shipping gnome2.0. However, they should be addressed post 2.0. 

menubar applet lives in gnome-applets, moving there

It seems to me that the panel menu should honor the gtk font size and
not respond to panel size (then every applet would have to do the same
and I've read that hard coding sizes is bad ...)

i believe that it would be possible to do this with relevant font
sizes based on the gtk font using some sort of pango markup, not too
knowledgable on the subject though.

Using standard menu items will reflect the user chosen gtk font size.
The current behavior is correct I believe. There shouldn't be any need
for the applet to fiddle with font sizes.

Try changing your gtk font size. If panel-menu-applet does not reflect
that, then there is a bug here.

But i don't want all fonts to be huge, i just want the fonts on the 
panel to match the size of the panel. Have you ever made your panel 
big, it looks really weird and I assume this would be an 
accessibility issue too. If its possible to implement this i think it 
would be nice and what a majority of users would expect. I sure did. 
Ultimately it's up to chris i guess.

I think you have the accesability issue backwards. Users who need 
large fonts will set the gtk font in hopes that all apps will honor 
that setting (save text editors etc).

Again I think hardcoding the font size is wrong. I'm pretty sure the 
accesability folks will agree here (anyone ?).

Unless the accesability folks think this is the right decision, I 
don't think this change should occur. I think it would be totally 
unexpected behavior since no other applet has ever done something 
like this.

not true: application launchers use larger icons on larger panels, WS
applet becomes larger as well. dict applet icon is larger , wanda is
larger, modem lights is larger, gnomemenu, battery applet, keyboard
layout switcher etc.. 

The fact that most applets resize on larger panels is what led me to
originally file this bug.

the only applets that would have to be changed to make this consistent
would be the clock, and the inbox monitor. 

I'm talking about text size. You would have to change every applet
that displays text.

i know you're talking about text size, but other than the clock and
inbox monitor which other ones would have to be changed.

Kevin is right.  Apps should respect the theme's font size, and not
select a new font size based on some heuristic of their own.

From the accessibility perspective, the user chooses things like icon
size and font size (in the theme).  Apps like panel should then size
themselves accordingly.

Billh informs me in email that this is much more important than I'd
believed; I'm moving it up then.

Luis: i don't understand. According to Bill this change should not be
implemented. Right now the menubar applet honors the gtk font size, so
it should work properly.

Sorry for not responding to this one earlier. :/ Bill, could you
clarify? Your email said that this should be marked up earlier, but...
as Kevin says, I think this currently does the right thing for a11y.
[Not to mention we're not shipping anyway, but :) 

Hrm. I thought bill was cc'd on this; my fault. Closing as per Kevin's
comment but Bill, please reopen if we're confused.

Louie:

Ill respect any decision you make, but surely you meant wontfix? Also
I have a similar bug for the clock and it appears that mark does plan
to implement this, so may be you could discuss this with him and make
a final decision on the correct behavior.