The menu spec currently makes some weak recommendations with regard to how categories are to be used. The reality however is that for an application to show up in the application menu it must either define its own submenu or use a category out of a small defined set. The menu spec doesn't make clear what that set is although it does provide some hints in the right direction. What is also missing is a requirement that desktop environments must continue to support this core set of categories. Failure to do so would result in applications no longer showing up in the menu which clearly can't be the intention.
The above situation is compounded by the fact that Gnome based implementations only place "Unallocated" entries in its menu if these entries list the "Application" category. The menu spec does not mention "Application" as category. We can either ignore this and effectively killing the "OnlyUnallocated" fallback, or add to the spec that all desktop files should include "Application" as category. Based on an evaluation of recent versions of Debian, Mandriva, Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu and Kubuntu including any single of the following categories will make an application show up in the menu: AudioVideo Audio (implies AudioVideo) Video (implies AudioVideo) Game Office System Development Education Graphics Network Utility I suspect that the 'Settings' category is also widely supported, on Gnome (At least under Redhat) items marked with a 'Settings' category will show up in a separate 'System/Preferences' menu and weren't reported by gnome-menu-spec-test but as long as they indeed do show up somewhere that shouldn't be a problem. In most cases Appendix A of the menu spec already lists one of the above categories as a "Related Category", however, it doesn't do this for the following categories, suggesting that these categories could be used as a category on its own. That's not the case though, when these categories are used on their own an application will not consistently show up in the application menu: News Amusement Applet Archiving Electronics Emulator Engineering FileManager Shell ScreenSaver TerminalEmulator TrayIcon I have made a patch for the Appendix A of the menu spec that clarifies what desktop entries can expect in terms of supported categories and what desktop environments must support. I will also attach a HTML version of the new Appendix for your convenience in a followup mail. Waldo Bastian Linux Client Architect - Client Linux Foundation Technology Channel Platform Solutions Group Intel Corporation - http://www.intel.com/opensource OSDL DTL Tech Board Chairman
menu-spec-categories.patch
Description: menu-spec-categories.patch
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