unity-dev team mailing list archive

[Ted Gould <ted@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2012-02-16 at 13:27 -0800, Ryan Beasley wrote:
> On 02/09/2012 06:59 AM, Ted Gould wrote:
> > I don't think that's actually where it makes sense to put the entry.
> > One of the reasons is that it won't work in the future :-)  In the
> > future applications will start checking g-s-d to see if the menus should
> > be shown or not instead of the appmenu indicator.  This is the same way
> > that GNOME applications are determining whether their application menu
> > is shown.
> 
> Okay, I apologize.  I missed Menu Proxying 101.  Could you please clue 
> me in regarding applications checking g-s-d (gnome-settings-daemon?) and 
> determining behavior wrt menus?  See, based on a reading of a Menu Bar 
> wiki¹, I'm assuming you're talking about changing the backend 
> implementation of (e.g.) gtk_menu_proxy_get().  Is that correct, or am I 
> totally missing things?
> 
> Is that planned for 12.10, or did it already land in 12.04 (alpha)?
> 

So we're adjusting things.  We'll be supporting both modes, registering
a menu, and getting it off of XAtoms in 12.04.  For GMenuModel
applications they will use the XAtoms, and we will support that, and we
expect to transition everything to that in time.  That transition won't
be complete in 12.04.

> Where could I keep track of any patches Canonical makes to Gtk, Qt, 
> etc. 
> to support menu proxying?

I'm not quite sure what you want here.  But if you want to look at the
Bazaar branches that track the packages those are in the Ubuntu
namespace.  So, for instance, you can track the GTK 3 package by doing:

  $ bzr branch lp:ubuntu/gtk+3.0

You can also set e-mail watches on that branch on this webpage:

  https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-branches/ubuntu/precise/gtk
+3.0/precise

But, I'm thinking you probably care a bit more about the module that
actually does the export.  And for GTK that's appmenu-gtk:

  http://launchpad.net/appmenu-gtk/

I can give other explanation if you give me some guidance on what type
of stuff you're looking for.

> > I think it would make more sense to use the menu display key that we've
> > got for doing Locally Integrate Menus and have a "in application" mode.
> 
> What is this?

So, that's an interesting point that I hadn't thought about.  Locally
Integrated Menus (LIM) might solve your problems.  Basically what they
are is taking a window's menus and putting them on the title bar of the
window in a drop down menu.  Here's a writeup:

  http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/02/ubuntu-12-04-to-ditch-global-menu/

That feature hasn't landed, but the specifics of the GSettings key is in
this branch:


http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ted/indicator-appmenu/local-menus-single-menu/view/head:/data/com.canonical.indicator.appmenu.gschema.xml.in

So what you could do is turn on the LIM feature when VMWare Unity is
launched, and then turn it back to the user's setting when using the
normal desktop.  I believe that (and I haven't used VMWare Unity so I
could very well be wrong here) you keep the window title bar, so the
user could get to the menus there.

Do you think that'd work?

		--Ted

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