Menulibre totally empty with mate

[bwat47]

Running Solus linux with mate 1.20 desktop, Menulibre version 2.1.5

If I launch menulibre, it shows no menu entries at all: https://i.imgur.com/RaMzBcr.png

However, my mate applications menu works fine and shows all the expected entries, it's just menulibre that's not showing anything

If I downgrade to menulibre 2.1.4 it works and I see all the menu entries, so it seems that the 2.1.5 update broke something

[Brian (thwaller)]

I also experience anomalies using this with MATE. I do not believe it is fully MATE compatible. I do not experience what you state, but I have issues with folder placement not matching and order of menu items.

I know that is somewhat unrelated to your post here, but I thought to join up and maybe evaluate MenuLibre with MATE with a bit wider scope.

[Sean Davis (bluesabre)]

@bwat47 I was unable to get MenuLibre running in Solus MATE.

@Brian Which distribution are you using?

Generally, MenuLibre should automatically determine the correct menu files if the desktop environment is exporting XDG_MENU_PREFIX as outlined by the desktop specification.

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/menu-spec-latest.html

This should be set by the desktop environment, and at least set by the package maintainer's configuration.

When I tested MATE compatibility, I used Ubuntu MATE.

[bwat47 (bwat47)]

@Sean, do you mean you saw the same problem as me or that you weren't able to open it?

[bwat47 (bwat47)]

I noticed that if I launch version 2.1.4 from the terminal it tells me: WARNING:menulibre: getDefaultMenuPrefix() 'No menu prefix found, MenuLibre will not function properly.'

However, it appears to work fine anyway

With version 2.1.5, I do *not* get any error when launching it from the terminal, but as shown in my screenshot it shows no menu entries at all.

I tried setting export XDG_MENU_PREFIX=mate- in my /etc/environment file, however this resulted in menulibre just not launching at all (both 2.1.4 and 2.1.5)

[Sean Davis (bluesabre)]

I managed to get MenuLibre running on Solus MATE. I am able to confirm the bug that you are seeing, but not able to determine what is causing it.

From what I can tell, the detection code is all working as expected, and the menu files between Ubuntu MATE and Solus MATE are identical.

[Thanos Apostolou (thanosapostolou)]

I'm using Solus with Mate 1.20. The menu prefix recognition works fine, however the problem exists in how menulibre reads the information. I use a patch in order to trick menulibre and use gnome-applications.menu even in a MATE session. Another workaround is to copy /usr/share/xdg/menus/gnome-applications.menu into ~/.config/menus/mate-applications.menu in order to trick menulibre again.

I haven't learned python (yet) so I cannot fully understand the code and help more. But probably you need to add specific conditions for some mate categories/names similar to what you've done for gnome. I see for example that the function getRequiredCategories() of util.py handles directories like `mate-development` for which you can just remove the prefix and name it 'Development' but it doesn't handle directories like `mate-utility-accessibility` which has name `Universal Access`. Same thing for getDirectoryName(directory_str) and getDirectoryNameFromCategory(name) functions (I haven't understood exactly how you use them, but I believe I understood more or less what they do)