since the code can filter out the application launchers pretty well, compared to egg-recent-model filtering functions, I'm not entirely convinced that keeping the recently used applications, files and documents (differences between "files" and "documents"?) physically separated into their own files is the right approach. all in all, is just a matter of filtering on a pattern ("*.desktop"), a group ("Launchers") or a MIME type ("application/x-desktop").

anyway, adding a (constructor-only) "filename" property to the RecentManager wouldn't require many changes.

obviously, the menu applet would have to save each .desktop file it launches, using the right MIME type, the right group and the right name.

Sure, it would be easy for the main menu to filter only the things it wants, the trick would be that the recent documents code would also have to filter those same things *out* of its list so that you didn't end up with applications in the Recent Files menu.

(For adding things to the recent-apps list, I'm pretty sure the only change we needed to make was to patch gnome_desktop_item_launch().)

okay, I'm much more convinced. :-)

is using something like:

  manager = g_object_new (GTK_TYPE_RECENT_MANAGER,
                          "filename", recent_apps_file,
                          NULL);

enough or should I add a specific function, like:

  GtkRecentManager *gtk_recent_manager_for_file (const gchar *filename);

The former is probably fine. If people suddenly come up with tons of other use cases where we want additional recently-used lists, you could always add the explicit constructor later.

A construct-only property sounds like a fine approach to me.

The GtkRecentManager in HEAD has the "filename" constructor-only property.