RE: No application or applet icons in gmome-shell-3.10.3

[John Frankish <j-frankish slb com>]

On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 1:02 AM, John Frankish <j-frankish slb com> wrote:
> > > > > I'm using gnome-shell on a simple linux system having compiling
> > > > > the various components from source.
> > > > >
> > > > > Whilst things seem to work well in the "activities view", I do not
> > > > > get any application icons on the desktop nor applet icons in the
> > > > > top panel.
> > > > >
> > > > > I can use nautilus to navigate to /usr/local/share/applications
> > > > > and launch various gnome apps by double-clicking on the *desktop
> > > > > files, so things seem to be in order, but I cannot figure out why
> > > > > there are no application icons on the desktop.
> > > > >
> > > > > Note that I've enabled desktop icons using dconf-editor, but this
> > > > > does not change anything - any trouble-shooting suggestions would
> > > > > be welcome.
> > > It might make it easier to troubleshoot if somebody could help me out with the following:
> > >
> > > 1. What application/script/etc does gnome-shell use to search for available applications?
> > >
> > > 2. What determines where gnome-shell searches for available applications?
> > >
> > > 3. What does gnome-shell search for - *desktop files, cache file from update-desktop-database, or?
> > In GNOME 3.10 and below, gnome-shell uses libgnome-menu to search for applications. Make sure your 
> > gnome-menus components is properly installed and updated, and you have menus in /etc/xdg/menus/.
> > Additionally, make sure that your $XDG_MENU_PREFIX is set to "gnome-", since that's the name of the menu 
> > files that gnome-menus installs. This should be set by gnome-session on startup.
> Thanks - that fixed it :)
>
> $XDG_MENU_PREFIX was not set (why wouldn't gnome-menus/gnome-shell assume "gnome-" as default until told 
> otherwise?)
>
> Because the spec says that it should assume the empty string if not set. Again, this set very explicitly by 
> gnome-session:
>
> https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-session/tree/gnome-session/main.c#n393
>
> so I'm not sure why it's not working.
>  
I double-checked and XDG_MENU_PREFIX="gnome-" or /etc/xdg -> /usr/local/etc/xdg alone are not enough to fix 
things, both are needed.

gnome-session doesn't appear to be setting $ XDG_MENU_PREFIX, but perhaps I'm starting gnome-shell 
incorrectly?

$ cat ~/.xsession
...
XDG_MENU_PREFIX="gnome-" "$DESKTOP" 2>/tmp/wm_errors &
...

Where $DESKTOP=gnome-shell