desktop environment specific XDG_CONFIG_DIRS

[Lei Zhang]

Hello,

I'm trying to add a system-wide menu item to both Gnome and KDE using
xdg-desktop-menu. I have been testing this on a variety of Linux
distros. On Fedora 7, I noticed if I installed my program from Gnome,
it shows up in both Gnome and KDE, but if I install it from KDE, it
only shows up in KDE.

It turns out on Fedora 7 with KDE, XDG_CONFIG_DIRS is set to
/etc/kde/xdg:/etc/xdg. This causes the .menu files generated by
xdg-desktop menu to go into /etc/kde/xdg/menus/applications-merged
instead of /etc/xdg/menus/applications-merged, and GNOME does not know
about /etc/kde/xdg.

Isn't this behavior defeating the point of XDG? So far Fedora 7 + KDE
is the only major distro I encountered that does this. Linux From
Scratch says to do this, [1] but I imagine that does not affect many
users.

- Lei

[1] http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/general/desktop-file-utils.html