PATCH: Menu Spec - Categories

[Bastian, Waldo]

>Le jeudi 07 septembre 2006 à 18:30 -0700, Bastian, Waldo a écrit :
>> 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.
>
>I'm sorry I can't participate more in this discussion (I'm too busy
>finishing our Mandriva 2007.0 release, I should have more time in about
>two weeks) but you might want to have a look at one document I wrote for
>our transition to full "XDG" menu for Mandriva Linux 2007.0 where we
>discovered "missing" categories, compared with our earlier menu
>structure :
>http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/MenuMigrationToXDG

It shouldn't be a problem to add some additional secondary categories to the spec.

>Another thing which is missing in the current spec is some kind of
>two-pass for category matching : there is no way to specify some
>categories have more priority than other. For instance, as a vendor, we
>might want to move some entries to another category (so we add our own
>vendor category) but keep fdo category matching (maybe in another
>location in the menu tree). With current category matching, menu entry
>will be duplicated.

There is two-pass (and exactly two) category matching. You can use the  <OnlyUnallocated> tag to do the matching in the second pass. Note that that tag must be a child of the <Menu> tag, it's not a matching predicate.

>Another missing thing is a way to add a preference for category or
>layout matching based on ShowOnlyIn, allowing us to ship one menu
>description file with different menu order and matching for GNOME and
>KDE (favoring GNOME applications when running GNOME, KDE apps when using
>KDE).

I'm working on a patch to allow desktop specific applications.menu files as currently used by Kubuntu and others.

Cheers,
Waldo