Desktop Menu Specification

[Daniel <daniel netbreeze com au>]

Hi everyone,

Does gnome2.6 support the Freedesktop.org Desktop Menu Specification?

(http://freedesktop.org/Standards/menu-spec/0.8/)

I'm trying to add a new menu to the gnome foot.. I want to be able to
distribute a package that adds this menu.

I've added a menu under Fedora Core 2 and all works fine. but it seems
that slackware and debian sid do not work the same way.

According to the spec the files should be placed in:
$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/menus/applications-merged/ for .menu files
$XDG_DATA_DIRS/applications/ for the .desktop files 
$XDG_DATA_DIRS/desktop-directories/ for the .directory files..

According to the XDG Base Directory Specification

(http://freedesktop.org/Standards/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-0.6.html)

These directories are by default:

$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS: /etc/xdg $XDG_DATA_DIRS: /usr/local/share:/usr/share

so these are the 'default' paths:

/etc/xdg/menus/applications-merged/ for .menu files
/usr/local/share/applications/ and
/usr/share/applications/ for the .desktop files
/usr/local/share/desktop-directories/ and
/usr/share/desktop-directories/ for the .directory files

This works under Fedora .. I'll include the contents of the files I've
used:

/etc/xdg/menus/applications-merged/test.menu:
------------------------------------------------------------------
<!DOCTYPE Menu PUBLIC "-//freedesktop//DTD Menu 0.8//EN"
"http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/menu-spec/menu-0.8.dtd";>

<Menu>
        <Name>Applications</Name>

        <DefaultAppDirs/>
        <DefaultDirectoryDirs/>

        <Menu>

                <Name>Test</Name>
                <Directory>test.directory</Directory>
                <Include>
                        <Category>Office</Category>
                </Include>

        </Menu>

</Menu>
------------------------------------------------------------------

/usr/share/desktop-directories/test.directory:
------------------------------------------------------------------
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Test
Comment=Test menu
Type=Directory
Icon=
Encoding=UTF-8
------------------------------------------------------------------

As I said.. this gives me a copy of the Office menu called 'Test' under
fedora. But others testing it under slackware and debian have not been
able to get it to work. Does anyone know what's going on? Under debian
and slackware the following directories don't exist:

/usr/local/share/desktop-directories/
/usr/share/desktop-directories/

And the following directory only contains kde stuff

/etc/xdg/menus/

Thanks,

Daniel