PATCH: Menu Spec - Categories

[Bastian, Waldo]

The menu spec currently makes some weak recommendations with regard to
how categories are to be used. The reality however is that for an
application to show up in the application menu it must either define its
own submenu or use a category out of a small defined set. The menu spec
doesn't make clear what that set is although it does provide some hints
in the right direction. What is also missing is a requirement that
desktop environments must continue to support this core set of
categories. Failure to do so would result in applications no longer
showing up in the menu which clearly can't be the intention.

The above situation is compounded by the fact that Gnome based
implementations only place "Unallocated" entries in its menu if these
entries list the "Application" category. The menu spec does not mention
"Application" as category. We can either ignore this and effectively
killing the "OnlyUnallocated" fallback, or add to the spec that all
desktop files should include "Application" as category.

Based on an evaluation of recent versions of Debian, Mandriva, Redhat,
Suse, Ubuntu and Kubuntu including any single of the following
categories will make an application show up in the menu:

AudioVideo
Audio (implies AudioVideo)
Video (implies AudioVideo)
Game
Office
System
Development
Education
Graphics
Network
Utility

I suspect that the 'Settings' category is also widely supported, on
Gnome (At least under Redhat) items marked with a 'Settings' category
will show up in a separate 'System/Preferences' menu and weren't
reported by gnome-menu-spec-test but as long as they indeed do show up
somewhere that shouldn't be a problem.

In most cases Appendix A of the menu spec already lists one of the above
categories as a "Related Category", however, it doesn't do this for the
following categories, suggesting that these categories could be used as
a category on its own. That's not the case though, when these categories
are used on their own an application will not consistently show up in
the application menu:

News
Amusement
Applet
Archiving
Electronics
Emulator
Engineering
FileManager
Shell
ScreenSaver
TerminalEmulator
TrayIcon

I have made a patch for the Appendix A of the menu spec that clarifies
what desktop entries can expect in terms of supported categories and
what desktop environments must support. I will also attach a HTML
version of the new Appendix for your convenience in a followup mail.

Waldo Bastian
Linux Client Architect - Client Linux Foundation Technology
Channel Platform Solutions Group
Intel Corporation - http://www.intel.com/opensource
OSDL DTL Tech Board Chairman
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: menu-spec-categories.patch
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 15364 bytes
Desc: menu-spec-categories.patch
Url : http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/attachments/20060907/82ca1d9a/attachment.obj