thoughts on handling .desktop files/menus

[Jasper Huijsmans]

Hi all, Botsie in particular,

I just had an idea about handling the gnome/kde menus. It's a bit
different from what we've been discussing and a bit more limited, but I
thought I'd mention it anyway.

Considering that:

o The new menu system is not yet stable. Every other desktop will use
its own interpretation. It's also a big mess, trying to be backward
compatible with the old standard.

o Do we really want to offer users a menu with all available programs on
the system? Because that is the default behaviour of these menus. I
would say people usually pick a few programs they like and use those.
On the other hand they might use the panel for that and use the menu for
'everything else' ...

My idea is to make a dialog that lets the user choose from all available
.desktop files. We could use this dialog both from a future menu editor
and from the panel. 

It would just present a list with available programs (.desktop files)
from certain directories (/usr/share/applications, etc.) with perhaps an
advanced tab to change the list of directories.

The list can be as fancy or simple as we want or are able to make,
showing the name, the description, perhaps the icon, the category, etc.

This is all very easy for me to say, since I have no time to work on
this, but I thought I'd mention it anyway. Definitely after 4.0, BTW.

	Jasper