Editing menus

[Eamonn Sullivan]

I love gnome, but one frustration with it is the difficulty of editing
menus for all users on the system. I have five children and a spouse
using this computer and I've been trying with out much success to add
items to the menus that are visible by all and survive a reboot.
Editing my own is fairly easy, but I've only succeeded once in getting
a new item added to a menu for everyone. I followed the directions in
the help system:

1. sudo nautilus applications-all-users:///
2. create new launchers where I want them

And then, nothing. The applications just don't show up on users'
menus. I've studied how the built-in ones work and copied them
exactly, putting the *.desktop files in /usr/share/applications etc.
and still nothing.

The one time this worked was when I compiled Inkscape 0.4 from source
and I followed the exact same procedure. If I open
applications-all-users:///, there's the Inkscape launcher, right next
to another one I tried to add. One is visible, one isn't. The
locations/permissions/owner of the two launchers and .desktop files
are *exactly* the same.

Out of desperation recently, I created menu items for myself and then
copied the changes in ~/.gnome manually to other users. That worked,
but only until the next reboot, whereupon the changes disappeared for
everyone except me.

Has anyone else succeeded? If so, how?