Installing package that contains a .desktop file does not appear in the Application Menu

I was briefly able to replicate this in lucid with the .desktop files shipped in the 'teg' and 'nethack' packages. The behaviour did not change after invoking update-gnome-menus-cache. I moved teg.desktop, and added a new teg.desktop including "Version=1.0", and re-updated the cache, with no change. I removed the edited teg.desktop and replaced it with the original. Both the teg and nethack entries appeared *without* running update-gnome-menus-cache.

thank you for your bug report, did the cache got updated after your install? could you look if your entry was listed there? did it work when restarting the session?

Hi, yes when I install my package it updates the cache, and after looking in the entry I see my game listed there with an entry that is the same to the .desktop file that I installed.

After restarting my session, nothing new happens. My icon is still missing from the menu - despite being in /usr/share/applications and the cache.

how is named the cache file and what locale do you use?

Cache file is named: desktop.en_GB.utf8.cache and as far as I know my local is English (United Kingdom).

do you get the menu item listed if you delete the cache?

Nope, after deleting desktop.en_GB.utf8.cache the menu item is still not listed. I even restarted my computer after that and the menu item was still not listed.

could you add an example to the bug, it will make easier to debug it

Sure, by example, do you mean the package I was trying to install?

yes or a .desktop to install to trigger the issue (with maybe a binary to create before so the .desktop entry doesn't seem broken by pointing to a non install binary)

Here is the package that I was installing.

Installing this package on Karmic results in a menu item being listed under the Games tab in Applications.

Installing this package in Lucid (Alpha 3) results in a menu item being listed under the Games tab in Applications.

Installing this package in the current version of Lucid, results in no menu item being listed under the Games tab in Applications.

I just downloaded that .deb, and I immediately get a working menu entry for it. After uninstalling it is removed again.

Can you please retry this on current lucid? (beta-1). I recently uploaded some fixes for the application menu cache:

  https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-menus/2.29.91-0ubuntu2

perhaps you didn't have that version yet? What is the version of python-gmenu that you have?

On the other hand..

> Nope, after deleting desktop.en_GB.utf8.cache the menu item is still not listed.

this indicates that it is not a cache issue in the first place.

But still, testing on current lucid is appreciated, so that we can see whether this was a bug recently fixed, or something unique to your system. Thanks!

Hi Martin,

I've downloading and installed the Beta release, and after installing the .deb file the menu item is created and located where I expected it to be.

I do run updates on my machine every week (at least) so I do have current updates, I guess that it is something unique to my machine - a symptom of the many updates perhaps?

Thanks for testing again. So I mark this as fixed.

In pre-beta 1 versions there were indeed various bugs in gnome-menus which made desktop files not appear at all/immediately.