Gnome panel menus

["D. Diederen" <D Diederen student ulg ac be>]

Hello everybody,

Perhaps I'm completely stupid, but I don't really understand the need of a
gazillon of separate files to describe the panel menus ...

Are you doing that because of the Windows way of doing it ? Every window
manager I've used for now was using a single file, and I didn't see any
shortcomings in that approach. The KDE panel, which is using separate .kdelnk
files, was *very slow* to load in comparison (restarting Window Maker is far
faster than restarting the KDE panel).

What about to simply have a structured storage file in
/whatever/path/panel.conf. The panel would simply try to open
~/.gnome/panel.conf and then /whatever/path/panel.conf if it fails. The first
time the user wants to edit a menu, the global one is copied into its home
directory and then edited.

Of course, you couldn't rearrange the menu structure with gmc, but what's the
matter ? A nice, simple menu editor could easily be written with gtk (pack a
GtkTree and a GtkCList in a GtkPaned, ala 'regedit', and you're done :). 

I can provide structured storage parsing/saving code*.

Cu,
Damien.

*) My structured storage files look like this:

! This is a comment
Administration = {
	! Escape sequences in keys
	Midnight\ Commander = {
		Exec = "/opt/gnome/bin/gmc";
		Icon = "~/graphics/pixmaps/file_manager.xpm";
	}
}
Graphics = {
	Gimp = {
		Exec = "/opt/gimp-1.1/bin/gimp";
		Icon = "/opt/gimp-1.1/share/gimp.xpm";
		! escape sequences in string values
		Comment = "This is the most \"wonderful\" graphics program";
	}
	GQView = {
		Exec = "~/bin/gqview";
		Comment = "A cool image viewer";
	}
}
Empty = {
}
Data\ types = {
	Integer = 55;
	Real = ~33.333333;
	String = "This is a string\nwith escape \"sequences\"";
	Data = #A11B335D347F2B;
}

-- 
char *info[] = { 
  "Diederen Damien", 
  "D.Diederen@student.ulg.ac.be",
  "http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Haven/6226/", 
};