Bug#589401: japa: Is not in Gnome menu

[Helmut Grohne]

Hi Torquil,

On Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 06:14:08PM +0200, Torquil Macdonald Sørensen wrote:
> I think (could be wrong) that a *.desktop file is necessary for an
> app to appear in the Gnome menu? Perhaps a good solution would be
> for the Debian package building process to autogenerate such files
> from the menu-file if they do not already exist?

Thanks for your investigation. Such a tool partly exists.

For the menu to .desktop conversion there is the menu-xdg package. This
could be used with gnome, however the maintainers decided not to do so.

> It seems inefficient to have every package maintainer create both
> menu and *.desktop files.

This is correct. The current standard for Debian is to provide a menu
file. There are some ideas about changing this to using .desktop files,
because more distributions use this method.

> I did now install the "alacarte" app, and enabled a Debian sub-menu
> within the gnome menu. It strikes me as quite strange that it is not
> there by default in the Debian OS, since gnome apps are only a
> fraction of the available gui apps in debian.

Good to know, that you found a workaround.

> Should I close this again then?

No. Please don't. It is a bug and it is not fixed. If the gnome
maintainers do not intend to fix it, they should tag it as wontfix.

To me it looks like the long term solution should be removing the Debian
menu system and replacing it with the system proposed by
freedesktop.org.

Helmut