Future of Appmenu Outside Unity

[Ted Gould]

On Tue, 2013-07-23 at 21:01 -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:

> Since shortly after Mark announced the global menu [1] Kubuntu has shipped 
> plasma-widget-menubar to provide this functionality [2] and not only for 
> Qt/KDE, but for Gtk apps as well [3].  This has served us well on netbooks for 
> three years and I use it myself on a daily basis on a conventional laptop.
> 
> As of today [4], that's no longer possible.  Appmenu-gtk has been replaced by 
> unity-gtk-module, which (apparently intentionally) doesn't work outside Unity 
> [5].
> 
> Is this correct?  That's my impression, but I'm not aware of any discussion 
> this, so I may have missed something.


Oh, cool.  I honestly didn't realize that it was still in use, very cool
that it has been useful!

In general, the big migration here is away from DBusMenu (which was
Ubuntu-only) to GMenu which is in GLib.  That's basically the difference
between appmenu-gtk and unity-gtk-module.  There's no technical reason
that it would only work on Unity, even if it's in the name.

Which means, in a nutshell, that plasma-widget-menubar would need some
porting.  Canonical has been working on QMenuModel[1] which provides
simple Qt bindings for GMenu exported menus, and should work well for
this purpose.  I know that Lars (cc'd) has some changes that he's
working on there, so it is expected to get better.  We are using
QMenuModel for all of the indicators in the Unity 8 interface, so you
can expect it to be well supported.

In indicator-appmenu (the module in Unity that supports the global menu
bar) we are currently supporting both DBusmenu applications and GMenu
based ones.  This is largely because everything isn't ported yet.  It
has been an unofficial goal to remove DBusmenu for the LTS.  I see no
issue in keeping appmenu-gtk as a package, but I would consider it
deprecated.

Ted


[1] https://launchpad.net/qmenumodel

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