Error when launcher target not found needs to be user-readable

There's nothing offensive in "killing children" within the semantic context of a computer's operating system, where children are processes, and killing means removing them from the process table. This isn't a bug, but a user error, arising from semantic confusion.

not a gnome-menus bug, not sure that's bug, the message come from a system library anyway and it's unix terminology as written before

frogzoo, I know perfectly well what executing a process means and what a child process is, because you and I are in the 0.01% or less of humans who will ever spend enough years on the command line to be dulled to that terminology. So enough with the "user error" talk, please. For the other 99.9% or more of humans the message is inappropriate, and completely unnecessarily so.

Sebastien, you're right, I see the bug occurs not just with menus but also with launchers on the desktop or in a folder. So
I guess there are two ways to fix this: (1) fix the string in glib, or (2) make some kind of translation (in gnome-vfs?) from the error emitted by the library into an error that is appropriate for humans. A good error message (description, reason, solutions) would be:
   “gnome-think” could not be opened,
   because the file “gnome-think” could
   not be found.
   ( Locate… ) ( Delete Menu Item ) (( OK ))
But even without any useful buttons, changing "execute child process" to "run the program" would be a major improvement.

There's a reference to this bug in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU/School/BugWork saying that this is fun.

I must admit that in the appropiate context (i.e. computer programmers) it is fun but, like Matthew, I'm worried about the people which isn't in that context and could misinterpret the sentence. Moreover, it's easier to make a bad translation of "execute child process" than "run the program". Therefore, I also think this should be fixed, seriously.

interesting

Could this be handled as "translation" ?

This is not a bug on Launchpad Translations.

A proper fix for this is manually filing a bug in each and every application. This one in particular seems to be inside http://svn.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-panel/trunk/gnome-panel/panel-menu-items.c, and panel-utils.c, which just forwards the error from gspawn in GDK. In other words, this means adding more detailed checks to either a (system-wide) library or every app, and making prettier messages there.