Provide a way to hide desktop files

[Duncan Lithgow]

Binary package hint: alacarte

Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) fresh install

Scenario:
Ben has found an odd program which does something useful but it's crashed and caused problems with another componant of his freshly installed Karmic Koala Ubuntu desktop machine. He reads the forum and knows that the Ubuntu devs like us to use apport, he would, but this application doesn't have apport integrated.

So he looks around for how to start apport amd attach something useful to the bug report. Eventually he finds that in 'System > Preferences > Edit Menu' he can enable 'Report a problem...'. He does this and it doesn't seem to do anything... he finds some similar bugs about this entry not working so he gives up.

End of sob story.

I've read those bug reports and I do get the reason for this menu entry being available but not doing anything. But that simply explains the reasons for the problem without offering a solution for all the people who've run into this.

For now I'm reporting this bug against alacarte because having the option of hidden menu items would avoid this bug.

A more useful solution might be for this menu entry to open and ask which application is causing problems, and then try and collect data about that application. We all know that sometimes things crash without being caught by apport.

[Duncan Lithgow (duncan-lithgow)]

I ahev subscribed Apport upstream developers and Canonical Desktop Team. I think this is the way to bring this bug to their attention. I am also making the bugs mentioned before duplicates of this, otherwise they're just a waste of space now that they're all marked 'invalid'

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

So the issue is that apport's .desktop file is _only_ providing a MIME type link. Apparently lots of people try to unhide that from alacarte (the menu editor) and then complain that it doesn't work.

There does not seem to be a way to tell alacarte "don't ever show this".

[Travis Watkins (amaranth)]

The problem is some things use NoDisplay to be hidden initially but we want the user to be able to enable them again. I wrote about this problem on the xdg list back in May but there is no solution for this.

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2009-May/010389.html