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Garcon Thoughts

There are some issues in garcon (previously libxfce4menu, with API changes and GIO support) that needs some discussion, most important: file monitoring support.

Specifications: Desktop Menu, Desktop Entry.
Sources: Garcon, Alacarte.

File Monitoring

We'd like the give the library build-in support for monitoring menu changes. This means we monitor the .menu file(s) for changes (for example made by Alacarte) and the .desktop file directories for added/removed/changed desktop files. When something changed we don't want to rebuild everything, but rather update and trigger some signals and notify properties.

GarconMenuDirectory

Description: FIXME

GarconMenuItemCache

Description: URI → GarconMenuItem item relation (hash table).

Maybe a signal when a item is added or removed to the pool, but I doubt this is very useful.

GarconMenuItemPool

Description: Desktop-ID → GarconMenuItem item relation (hash table).

Maybe a signal when a item is added or removed to the pool, but I doubt this is very useful.

GarconMenuItem

Description: The desktop file.

We're not going to implement file monitoring on this level. However there will be some new API to reload a desktop entry (possibly from a new location) and the possibility to watch changes (signal, property notifications).

GarconMenuItem::changed (VOID:VOID)
Always triggered then the item is reloaded.

void garcon_menu_item_reload (void)
Reload the menu item from the same GFile. This will notify the changed properties and trigger the 'changed' signal.

void garcon_menu_item_reload_from_file (GFile *file)
Will do the same as garcon_menu_item_reload() but from another location, useful when a user changed a desktop file in a read-only location and the menu editor moved the file to ~/.local/share/applications/.

GarconMenu

Description: FIXME

Misc

A couple of tasks that need to be done:

  • Always return a reffed object in the _get_ functions and mention this in the API docs.
  • A couple of structs need to move to the header.
  • Personally I find the gio helpers a bit ugly in the public api, maybe we can make this private (preferred) or rename them to start with garcon_.
  • Possibly drop garcon_init() and garcon_shutdown(). Still needs some thoughts, but it would be nice if we can simplify this as much as possible.
    • Implement GarconMenuSeparator and GarconMenuItemCache as a singleton.
    • Get rid of g_thread_init(). This should be possible if we use GStaticMutex instead of GMutex.
    • People only need to call garcon_set_environment(), this will 'leak' once if they don't call garcon_set_environment (NULL), but I don't think we really care.
    • Don't know about g_type_init() yet. Probably not needed 99% of the time, so I think if we mention this in the API docs we're pretty much safe.