Comment 17 for bug 139980

Daniel: It is probably possible but the workaround may be a pretty nasty hack. I don't have a whole lot of experience with debian rules files but from what I can tell it is only installing what the Makefile gives it. If the Makefile gives it /usr/share/applnk then debian/rules will expect that to exist. The root of the problem definitely lies in the configure/Makefile itself, which is called during the building of the package.

If you would rather it be a hack than an upstream modification then I'll see what I can do but I'll leave it to others as well if they would like to attempt a "debian/"-only fix. For now I'm not sure how it would work. Maybe the answer lies in a debhelper script to install menus.