RE: Debian support for XDG_MENU_PREFIX under GNOME
>Le lundi 04 décembre 2006 à 10:59 -0800, Bastian, Waldo a écrit :
>> 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-"
>
>Having this implemented with an environment variable is a very wrong
>decision IMHO. Furthermore, there is no way such a thing can be
>integrated in Debian as it conflicts directly with policy §9.9.
Where can I find this policy?
>> 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?
>
>Indeed, as gnome-menus expands the menu name based on the patched name,
>it is reading gnome-applications-merged.menu.
>
>I'm all for patching gnome-menus (as well as gnome-panel and bug-buddy
>if necessary) to read applications-merged.menu instead of
>gnome-applications-merged.menu if this can help, but this will *not* be
>done with an environment variable.
It's the applications-merged directory.
Note that the environment variable doesn't need to control the behavior of the desktop environment, it should merily inform applications about the prefix that's used for the current session.
Cheers,
Waldo
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