menu editing with multiple menu editors

[Christian Neumair]

I've just finished writing a prelimitary version of a GNOME menu editor
that simply does some <Include>/<Exclude> magic to adapt the application
menus in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME without providing any sophisticated layout
manipulation magic. To be more precise, I place my modifications in
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/menus/applications-merged/gnome-menu-editor.menu. The
KDE-specific applications.menu contains

        <DefaultMergeDirs/>
        <MergeFile>applications-kmenuedit.menu</MergeFile>

in the end. Therefore, the kmenuedit changes always override other
changes from <DefaultMergeDirs/>, even those from applications-merged.

How can we aviod that the changes of one editor don't take effect in the
menu because they are overriden my changes of another editor?
Distributors will have to decide what menu file they use, so the problem
could exist the other way around as well.
Wouldn't it be useful to have a shared menu file? How do you organize
changes to that file? I currently use a simple libxml2-wrapper to get
existing menu nodes or construct them if they're not yet there and
append an <Include> or <Exclude> rule set for the shown/hidden menu
entry, deleting all former rule sets matching the <Filename> of the
desktop file in question in the menu.

>From what I can see from screenshots, KMenuEdit is way more
sophisticated (and way more complicated). How can we avoid messing up
your complex layout, still being able to edit a common menu file?

-- 
Christian Neumair <chris at gnome-de.org>