Menu-Spec and nested AppDirs

[Heinrich Wendel]

On Monday 06 June 2005 17:03, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> On Thursday 26 May 2005 18:05, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> > On Thu, 2005-05-26 at 17:19 +0200, Heinrich Wendel wrote:
> > > Leave the filename as it is, but put the file in the
> > > applications-changed dir and add this AppDir to all edited Menus? This
> > > would keep the benefits of the desktop-file-id.
> >
> > 	(What "benefits" are you referring to here, btw?)
> >
> > 	So, my suggestion had two parts and I was probably confusing things by
> > putting them together:
> >
> >   1) Use a separate directory for edited .desktop files because if
> >      $XDG_DATA_HOME is "/usr/share in your homedir", I think its just
> >      as inappropriate to put edited files there as it would be to put
> >      them in /usr/share.
> >
> >      This is really something that should be discussed as "what exactly
> >      is $XDG_DATA_HOME for?", rather than just thinking about menu
> >      editing, though.
> >
> >   2) That you give edited files a different desktop file ID so that you
> >      no longer have to worry about the order of <AppDir>s in the .menu
> >      file when you're implementing a menu editor which
> >      modifies .desktop files.
> >
> >      I think this makes sense for various reasons, but to give one
> >      example - consider a .desktop file which is <Include>d in two
> >      menus. If a user edits an entry in one menu, she wouldn't also
> >      expect it to change in the other menu. (Yes, its a corner case
> >      but ....)
> >
> >      Anyway, its this ".desktop file renaming" part of my suggestion
> >      which is really more relevant to the problem you're pointing out.
>
> The problem with that approach is that the relation between original and
> renamed file is lost, in particular applications or settings that refer to
> the original .desktop file will fail to pick up the changes that the user
> has made. It would make the whole concept of the desktop file ID useless.

What about this:

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/menus/applications:
This one is for new entries a User does to his menu. This should be part of 
<DefaultAppDirs/>, but would break backwards-compatibility then.

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/menus/applications-changed:
This one is for changed entries. Menu Editors have to add it to the Menu if 
they made a change.

Same for desktop-directories.

> Cheers,
> Waldo
mfg, heinrich :-)