what's going on with menus?

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

Hey,
	In case people are wondering what's going on with GNOME and the new
menu spec[1] etc., here's what the plan is looking like:

  1) Split out the menu spec implementation from desktop-file-utils into
     a new module in GNOME CVS

  2) Instead of a gnome-vfs module which basically does "give me the
     menu as a hierarchy of .desktop files" it would be a simple API
     which does "give me the menu hierarchy as a list of
     Name/Tooltip/Icon pairs and launch an entry when I tell you"

  3) Remove all traces of editing from the menu spec implementation.

  4) We'd remove the applications://, preferences://, system-settings://
     etc. URI schemes and make the panel use libmenu directly.

  5) Write a simple menu editor for the panel which allows you to
     enable/disable menu items - it would just generate a .menu file in
     .config with a set of <Include>/<Exclude>s[2].

     The idea here is that editing the layout of the menus without 
     exposing the nature of the vfolder just creates a big mess. 
     However, by far the most common use case is just to remove an item
     from the menu and this can be done with a simple on/off toggle.

  6) Write a more complex menu editor which would be more like the 
     vfolder editor in Evolution - i.e. a menu editor that makes it
     clear that each sub-menu is in fact a query against the available
     .desktop files. This tool would be intended for sysadmins editing
     the systemwide menu.


	There's only one problem here - no-one is really working on it yet. Dan
Williams and I have been doing a bit of work on that code in
desktop-file-utils, but we're don't (yet) have time to commit to getting
some of the more heavy lifting done.

	What I'd really love to see is someone trying out ideas (even just
mockups) for (5) and (6) and discussing them here ...

Cheers,
Mark.

[1] - http://freedesktop.org/Standards/menu-spec
[2] - One difficulty with this is that you there isn't any way we can
      easily present an item that has been <Exclude>d in the systemwide
      menu in order for the user to be able to <Inlcude> it - hmmm