Menu Editor

[Raphael Groner]

Maximilien Noal noal.maximilien at gmail.com 
Wed May 2 19:14:43 CEST 2012
> If one has to make an "official" menu editor for Xfce, I think that 
> alacarte-xfce [1] will be a good starting point, instead of starting 
> from scratch. 

It does not make much sense to use alacarte-xfce as a starting point
for coding. Although, it's a good place where all the available patches
are listed. I've tried already to mention it in another mail: There's
a needed dependency to gnome-menus2, and Alacarte is written in Python
with corresponding Python/C bindings. Not only that, Fedora has a
dependency to gnome-panel that will invent between half to all the
Gnome3 stuff, WTF? I can not say anything about Xubuntu. 
When you look into the source of Alacarte, you can see that this
library is used for nearly the whole of the data structures used
internally by alacarte to cache the menu structure. To port it to xfce
only, this will then mean to rewrite the whole backend. You then reuse
only the GUI, which is one single Glade file without any functionality.
There are no Python bindings for garcon available, so far. PyXfce seems
to be dead, and it has only something for libxfce4menu that is also
dead (due to replaced by garcon).

> It works flawlessly from my user point of view, but I was told by
> the/a Xubuntu maintainer that it had still some weird bugs (I quote :
> "it tends to copy categories, menues, and .desktop files in
> ~/.config/cache even when they are not being modified" [2])and was
> more or less unmaintained upstream.

I can confirm that the files are copied always. But what's the problem?
Those files do not harm and Alacarte has the option to reset everything
to default; this will copy the standard again. There's some spec for all
that menu stuff, availabe at the Gnome project.