Of Start Menu, Shortcuts and broken functions...

[Subhobroto Sinha]

Hello all,

Recently there has been a revived interest in putting
up a 'Windows' like 'Start Menu' onto the Window
managers.
That's good.Thanks.

But as I see it, this task is REALLY easy.
Once we resolve the Windows shorcut files,figuring out
how to implement the resolved menu entries for
respective Desktop environments is dependent on the
Desktop environment themselves, and people wanting to
implement the 'Start Menu' on that environment.
Windows maintains it's 'Start Menu' under
'%ROOTDIR%\Documents and Settings\%USER%\Start Menu'
(yeah I am talking >=NT,Win2k. For 9x, it will be
probably 'C:\WINDOWS\Start Menu'), and this folder
contains LOADS of shortcut (.lnk) files.
So if we can just recurse through this folder and read
out the .lnk files into compatible menu/desktop
entries of the corresponding Desktop environment
(KDE,GNOME...), we have a working, synchronized 'Start
Menu'.

And that's JUST what McCormack's 'winemenubuilder'
does, and reading out the code I can see it's THE
thing we need.

Unfortunately, 'winemenubuilder' shipped from
Wine-20030618 - the VERY version from which
IPersistFile::Load() (the VERY function used to
resolve windows shortcuts) got broken, so I could not
see 'winemenubuilder' in practise!
(Mike, if you are reading this, could you tell me on
what Wine ver you originally developed it, and does
'winemenubuilder' work now ? Thanks)

You yourself may try out 'winemenubuilder', and if it
works let me know. I will know that I was at fault all
along,and that would be good news for me !

Now, there arises the problem. Microsoft really does
not tell us what's the data structure of .lnk files,
though if Alexandre (or somebody of his status..)
requested Matt Pietrek for that information, we can
probably get it.

Till then we are having to do with reverse engg., and
let me tell you,that worked fine till Wine-20030618,
i.e the Wine tarball release on the 18th June 2003.