alacarte object has no attribute 'startswith'

[zniavre]

Binary package hint: alacarte

using ubuntu 11.10 without unity and gnome-shell
minimal installation of gnome-3.0
the Application menu is empty, new user does not solve the empty Application menu.
launching 'alacarte' gives a traceback (must be sent with bug-report).

thank you best regards

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: alacarte 0.13.2-2ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0-1.2-generic 3.0.0-rc3
Uname: Linux 3.0-1-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue Jun 21 16:27:44 2011
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=fr_FR:en
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=fr_FR.utf8
 LC_MESSAGES=fr_FR.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: alacarte
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-06-07 (14 days ago)

[zniavre (zniavre2048-gmail)]

zniavre2@zniavre2:~$ alacarte
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/alacarte", line 37, in <module>
    main()
  File "/usr/bin/alacarte", line 33, in main
    app = MainWindow(datadir, version, sys.argv)
  File "/usr/share/alacarte/Alacarte/MainWindow.py", line 49, in __init__
    self.editor = MenuEditor()
  File "/usr/share/alacarte/Alacarte/MenuEditor.py", line 36, in __init__
    self.__loadMenus()
  File "/usr/share/alacarte/Alacarte/MenuEditor.py", line 44, in __loadMenus
    self.applications.path = os.path.join(util.getUserMenuPath(), self.applications.tree.get_menu_file())
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/posixpath.py", line 66, in join
    if b.startswith('/'):
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'startswith'
zniavre2@zniavre2:~$ ubuntu-bug alacarte

[Jason Conti (jconti)]

Marking this as confirmed. The gnome-menus package includes a patch that renames /etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu to gnome-applications.menu. Including a minimal patch that allows alacarte to run. However it is possible for tree.get_menu_file() to return None if both ~/.config/menus/gnome-applications.menu and /etc/xdg/menus/gnome-applications.menu are missing, and alacarte should probably check for this and handle it gracefully.

This will not fix the problem of the Applications menu being empty. Copying ~/.config/menus/gnome-applications.menu back to applications.menu will populate the menu, so it seems gnome-panel doesn't handle this change yet either. There is a bug for this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-panel/+bug/798951

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for the report, linking the upstream report https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647382.