Debian support for XDG_MENU_PREFIX under GNOME
Hi,
I'm trying to find out what the status is of Debian's support for XDG_MENU_PREFIX. In case you have no idea what XDG_MENU_PREFIX is, let me explain:
The XDG Menu Specification specifies the use of an applications.menu file to describe the menu layout. This implies a single menu layout regardless of desktop environment used. Some distributions (Debian in particular) wanted to have different menu layouts dependng on the desktpo environment used, and decided to prefix the applications.menu file with either "gnome-" or "kde-". Unfortunately this breaks applications that expect an applications.menu file to be used (as the specification says it will). To accommodate the need for different desktop layouts under different desktop environments, the XDG Menu Spec has been updated [1] and the notion of $XDG_MENU_PREFIX has been introduced. XDG_MENU_PREFIX indicates the prefix, if any, that is applied in front of "applications.menu". So if Debian is using "gnome-applications.menu" instead of "applications.menu", it will need to export XDG_MENU_PREFIX="gnome-"
That's the straightforward part. The hairy part is that XDG_MENU_PREFIX must _NOT_ be applied to the applications-merged directory. The rationale for this is that third party applications should be able to install menu extension in applications-merged that apply regardless of the desktop environment used. So far Debian did/does not follow this part of the specification and used/uses "gnome-appplications-merged" and "kde-applications-merged" instead of "applications-merged". Kevin Krammer recently patched KDE 3.5.x to correct this behavior for KDE under Debian. I was wondering whether this problem has been addressed at the GNOME side as well?
Note that it is the intention of LSB to require XDG Menu Spec compliance for LSB 3.2.
Cheers,
Waldo
[1] http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/menu-spec-1.0.html
Intel Corporation - Channel Platform Solutions Group - Hillsboro, Oregon
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