On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 05:13:43PM +0200, Nicolas Kovacs wrote:
After some more experimenting, I found the culprit. It looks like the structure of the classic Applications menu is not only defined by the individual *.desktop files in /usr/share/applications, but also in a weird /etc/xdg/menus/gnome-applications.menu file which contains a bunch of redundancies. Not exactly KISS principle.
So it looks like in order to customize my menus, I have to edit individual *.desktop files in /usr/share/applications as well as the XML-style entries in /etc/xdg/menus/gnome-applications.menu.
I bluntly admit I don't get the logic behind this sort of thing.
If you want to define new menu categories, put a file ending with .menu in /etc/xdg/menus/applications-merged/. It should be read in by any of the default .menu files that call DefaultMergeDirs. I'm pretty sure this will only let you define new menus, and not override existing ones. But it sounds to me like you're editing a lot of files that will most likely be replaced next time you get an update to the gnome-menus package.
I define extra menu entries and then define XDG_DATA_DIR to a network volume to provide menu entries for our 3rd-party licensed software.
Just be aware that if you point XDG_DATA_DIR to a directory that is exists but you aren't permitted to read will cause Gnome 3 to crash in CentOS7. (I've already filed a bug)