Re: menu behavior

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Fri, Jun 02, 2000 at 02:11:02PM -0700 or thereabouts, Joseph de los Santos wrote:
> Hi,
> I would like to know why gnome *sometimes* does not install applications in 
> the gnome menu automatically and *sometimes* it does unlike enlightenment. 
> i.e. when I installed xchat,everybuddy,emacs,balsa etc gnome added them in 
> my system menu automatically but when I installed other software like 
> realplayer,staroffice,gkrellm,exmh... it did not add them  unlike in my 
> enlightenment system menu *everything's* there... (almost all anyway) and if 
> it's possible, how can I make gnome behave that way?

By GNOME menu, do you mean the list of programs you get in the gnome
foot menu? If so, I think the explanation is this.

When you install an application, it puts a bunch of files all over
the place. One of those files is sometimes a application.desktop
file which goes in $prefix/gnome/apps/Somedirectory/

($prefix will vary: it's /usr/share for RH, and I believe /opt for
some others).

If you look at the contents of some of these files, which are just
ASCII files and thus entirely readable, they generally contain a
name, a bunch of translations of the name, an icon, whether it
runs within a terminal or not, and so on.

As far as I can tell, the menu looks at that directory to see
what's included in it, and if there's a file for a program in
there, it lists it in the gnome foot menu.

I -think- that if the application doesn't come with one of these
application.desktop files, then it won't get picked up by the gnome
menu as existing.

I don't know how enlightenment looks for things to include in the
menu. It may very well do things differently, or look in extra
places. I know that with windowmaker you can tell it where to look
for files (because for a laugh I tried setting the "programs" menu
you can use in windowmaker to look at /usr/bin and managed to make
a menu that's some hundreds of lines long. I really must change it
back one day.)

If you look at your lists of which appear on the gnome menu or
don't, the majority of those which do are GNOME apps, which of
course come with $prefix/gnome/-etc-etc files. Of the list
which don't appear, two of the four are commercial apps, and the
makers possibly aren't too bothered about appearing on a GNOME
menu (I dunno. I'm guessing).

There was an effort on this list a while back to create desktop
files for applications which didn't come with them. So if you
had, say StarOffice, which isn't a GNOME app, you could grab a
StarOffice desktop file and put it in the right place and the
menu would start including it. If you look back through the 
archives you'll find a bunch of them. (They're not hard to write:
just steal the format, create a new one, and see what happens :))

If I have any of this wrong (which is more than possible), please
correct me, because I'd be interested to know how it works if I
am wrong about all this.

Telsa