new menu spec in 2.6

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

For 2.6 we really need to move to the new menu specification, or we will
be lame and embarrassed and unable to fully enjoy the glorious new
nautilus, file selector, volume handling, and other toys.

Here is the status:

 1. There's an implementation in desktop-file-utils that 
    includes a VFS backend. It's within a few days of 
    being good enough for a read only implementation.

 2. Editing is horrible. Horrible. The mere thought of 
    finishing the VFS-based editing implementation gives me 
    nightmares.
    I could do a lot more useful things with this time.

 3. Some people have mentioned re-adding Favorites to 2.6, 
    don't know if it will happen.

 4. I don't plan to implement migration from old menu 
    format to new.

Questions:

 - how to arrange the modules. I would like desktop-menu-tool 
   and gnome-vfs backend to share the same code. We could add 
   desktop-file-utils to GNOME but I'm not sure it makes that much 
   sense. Maybe it's time for the old cut-and-paste.

 - does anyone want to write a standalone menu editor GUI that
   simply edits an arbitrary menu-spec-compliant XML file, 
   rather than going through the VFS? Maybe this combined
   with favorites would let us leave the VFS backend read-only.

 - If nobody writes that GUI editor, what do we do?

 - or alternately, does someone want to volunteer to make the 
   VFS backend writable...

In any case, I will probably use the new read-only backend in Fedora
Core and RHEL, since we have the current backend running read-only
anyway.

I want to just sit down for a few days and finish up the read-only
backend, that's basically what I have time to do. Anything more
ambitious I could use help on.

Havoc