Created attachment 118643 [details] [review]
The current patch we use

Do you have a pointer to the spec on how this stuff works?  You're the first to tell us this is not right, but I have no clue where to determine what the right thing to do is.  :-(

See http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/apa.html

The table there shows Accessibility with required parent category of either Utility or Settings (Additional Categories table) so you are supposed to include one of these in the category list (and Orca is clearly not a setting :P).

I think "Utility" is purposely not present so that Orca appears only under the Accessibility ("Universal Access") menu:

   http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-love/2007-March/msg00011.html

I think this is something to fix in the gnome-menus rather than in Orca

(In reply to comment #5)
> I think this is something to fix in the gnome-menus rather than in Orca

If you can propose a fix for the GNOME menus that allows your Orca patch to work and still ends up with Orca under the "Universal Access" menu, I can definitely consider your patch for Orca.  Right now, however, I cannot accept your patch because of the behavior it will introduce.

Please feel free to open a new GNOME menus bug for the gnome menus one and make this one depend up that new bug so we can track it.  Thanks!

Quoting my applications.menu:

        <Category>Utility</Category>
        <!-- Accessibility spec must have either the Utility or Settings
             category, and we display an accessibility submenu already for
             the ones that do not have Settings, so don't display accessibility
             applications here -->
        <Not><Category>Accessibility</Category></Not>

$ rpm -qf /etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu 
gnome-menus-2.24.0-1.i686

(In reply to comment #7)
> Quoting my applications.menu:
> 
>         <Category>Utility</Category>
>         <!-- Accessibility spec must have either the Utility or Settings
>              category, and we display an accessibility submenu already for
>              the ones that do not have Settings, so don't display accessibility
>              applications here -->
>         <Not><Category>Accessibility</Category></Not>
> 
> $ rpm -qf /etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu 
> gnome-menus-2.24.0-1.i686
> 

Excellent.  If you can get the gnome-menus component to take your applications.menu change *and* your patch for the Orca desktop works with that change, I can work to get your patch for the Orca desktop in.  Thanks!

I didn't change anything, that's stock gnome-menus 2.24, check on your own machine :)

(In reply to comment #5)
> I think this is something to fix in the gnome-menus rather than in Orca

The word "fix" implies to me that something is broken.  

Are you saying that it's not broken anymore (i.e., the gnome-menus folks fixed it some time after March 2007)?  From the "my applications.menu" wording in comment #7, it seemed to indicate is was *your* file that *you* had modified.  Now, in comment #9, you say it's the unmodified file.  So...I'm confused :-(.

The reason I'm giving this so much scrutiny is: 1) what we have now works (i.e., "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"), and 2) benign looking changes to the desktop file can end up causing the menu item to fly to unexpected places on various distributions.  This results in angry users and distribution providers filling my inbox with hate mail.

I thought it might need a fix but after checking the files I discovered the fix was commited in gnome-menus 2.22.2.

Reference: http://svn.gnome.org/svn/gnome-menus/tags/GNOME_MENUS_2_22_2/layout/applications.menu

Thanks for clearing that up.  As I mention, changes like this can result in unexpected behavior.  But, your pointers and discussion helped clarify things, and I also tested this on Ubuntu and OpenSolaris.  So, fingers crossed, I committed the patch for GNOME 2.24.1.  Thanks for bearing with me.