Future of Appmenu Outside Unity

[Ted Gould]

On Tue, 2013-07-23 at 22:23 -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:

> On Tuesday, July 23, 2013 09:00:33 PM Ted Gould wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Actually, DBusMenu is an upstream KDE feature.  You may recall it was 
> originally a joint Ubuntu/KDE development.  


Hmm, I don't recall.  But history is best argued over beer rather than
e-mail  :-)


> We're at KDE SC 4.11 RC1 right 
> now, so it's too late to do anything upstream KDE in 4.11 and the Plasma 
> Workspace is feature frozen after 4.11 so that upstream can focus on Plasma 2 
> (that will use Qt5 and KDE Frameworks).  So we're several release cycles away 
> from being able to do anything upstream.  



That's unfortunate.  I don't know if I can get someone assigned to it,
but if so, would you guys be willing to distro patch it?  I'm not sure
if QMenuModel works on Qt 4, I think so, but hopefully Lars can verify
that when it gets to his timezone.


> > 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.
> 
> How does this impact support in applications?  For Qt/KDE apps (due to the 
> integration in Qt4) it just works.  There's no need to patch individual 
> applications.  Is this true for QMenuMode?  Is it for Qt4 and Qt5?  What's the 
> upstream plan for it?



QMenuModel is just a helper library, similar to libdbusmenu.  It's not
doing the integration aspects there.  We haven't discussed (AFAIK)
porting libdbusmenu-qt users to QMenuModel with any seriousness.  I
think that we should, but I'll need to gather more data on the impact,
etc.  I imagine that most of the people I'd ping on it are maxed out for
13.10 already though.


> > 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.
> 
> AIUI, currently unity-gtk-module conflicts appmenu-gtk, so they can't both be 
> installed together.  That would have to be fixed since many users have both 
> Kubuntu and Ubuntu installed and I think we want to support that.
> 
> Also, the gtk/gtk3 patches that supported appmenu-gtk have been dropped, so 
> even if we brought the package back, it wouldn't build.  Can those be added 
> back?
> 
> Also keeping it now, just to drop it for the LTS doesn't really help much 
> since the Plasma Desktop will still be using DBusMenu and we'd just have to 
> drop it then.


Yes, I forgot about the GTK patches, those are a bit trickier.  What do
you think would be a good solution?  Do you think it'd be reasonable to
have GTK applications not work in the plasma menubar for 13.10?  That's
clearly the easiest solution, but perhaps too broken.

Ted

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