XDG Menus GNOME vs. KDE

[James Richard Tyrer]

It was brought to my attention (more than once) by a user that KDE and 
GNOME each install their own version of:

	/etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu

{path varies from system to system}

Clearly this doesn't work if you have both GNOME and KDE installed on 
the same system.  Obviously, what you want is for the GNOME file and the 
KDE file to coexist and be used by their respective desktops.

IIUC, this could be addressed by installing GNOME and KDE with different 
installation prefixes.  However, since some distros (e.g. FC) install 
them both with a prefix of "/usr", this isn't *the* solution.

The spec says that the file is to be installed:

	$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/menus/applications.menu

This seems to be less than satisfactory in this case.  I don't even seem 
to have that environment variable set on my system so both KDE and GNOME 
must have a default.

Because the desktop and/or the system administrator might add files to 
the directory:

	$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/menus

and theses would be different for each desktop, it appears to me that 
the standard should support:

	$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/menus.<desktop>/applications.menu

then either the desktop could look for its directory or an environment 
variable: XDG_DESKTOP could be set so that the file would be:

	$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/menus.$XDG_DESKTOP/applications.menu

Or, the existing path could be [for example]:

	/etc/xdg.<desktop>/menus

and the existing environment variable XDG_CONFIG_DIRS or the desktop's 
default could be set accordingly.

In either case, if the desktop couldn't find a path that contained its 
name (as its default), it could fall back to the path without its name.

-- 
JRT