Bug#694356: update-menus silently failing with Gnome?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 29/09/13 20:09, Adam D. Barratt wrote:
> On Sun, 2013-09-29 at 19:55 +0200, Daniel Pocock wrote:
>> I can see that update-menus is run during the dpkg install and I tried
>> running it again manually.
>>
>> I can even find the .desktop file for Gnome after update-menus has run,
>> it looks OK
>>
>> However, the item just doesn't appear in the menu, even after logging
>> out and rebooting
> 
> GNOME uses .desktop files, and (in jessie and sid) does not use the
> Debian menu at all; see #694356.
> 

Thanks for the fast reply

The bug doesn't really give a lot of detail about the strategy for this
- Debian appears to have a perfectly good menu tool and it is not clear
why it has to be ditched.  If it is a permanent change, does somebody
need to raise a bug against the document that I was referring to?

Should lintian implement a new check for packages with
menu-file-but-no-dot-desktop ?

For those feeling lazy, I suppose we can just grab the .desktop file
generated under /var by update-menus and copy it into our packages?  Or
is there a more elegant way to manage the duplication with debhelper
support perhaps?  If somebody could add that under the bug it might help
those who face this issue in future.

For now, I've just added this to debian/install:

debian/postbooks.desktop usr/share/applications

and put a postbooks.debian file in debian/