Bug#701942: gnome-menus: <DefaultMergeDirs> not honoured in /etc/xdg/menus/gnome-applications.menu

[Fernando J. Rodríguez]

Package: gnome-menus
Version: 3.4.2-5
Severity: normal

Menus coming from definitions in XML files located in /etc/xdg/menus/application-merged or
~/.config/menus/application-merged are ignored in Gnome.

/etc/xdg/menus/gnome-applications.menus does contain a <DefaultMergeDirs> that I think is supposed
to make the contents of /etc/xdg/menus/application-merged and ~/.config/menus/application-merged
be read, but that's not happening.
Or maybe the default merge directories are not those, I don't know.

I can fix this by adding the following line in /etc/xdg/menus/gnome-applications.menu inmediately
below <DefaultMergeDirs>:
<MergeDir>/etc/xdg/menus/applications-merged</MergeDir>

That at least enables whatever definitions or overrides are in the mentioned directory's files.

This bug affects me in 3 ways:

- The additional menus created by the extra-xdg-menus package are missing, and menu items supposed
  to appear in that menus appear insted in the "Others" menu.
- Menus and submenus created by wine are not displayed and their items go flattened into the
  "Others" menu.
- My hand-made XML .menu files for overriding a few system-provided definitions are ignored.


I see this behaviour both in the "Gnome Classic" session's Application menu as well as in the
"Gnome" session's Application selector (or whatever is called the grid of huge application icons).

A final, possibly unrelated note: I've found reports that this behaviour is also present in
Cinnamon or MATE, and in different distributions.



-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.0
  APT prefers testing-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'testing-updates'), (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=es_AR.utf8, LC_CTYPE=es_AR.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages gnome-menus depends on:
ii  dpkg    1.16.9
ii  python  2.7.3~rc2-1

gnome-menus recommends no packages.

gnome-menus suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information