K-Menu, XDG menus and Kiosk woes

[Martijn Klingens]

Hiya,

I'm cross-posting to kde-core-devel a problem that has frequently popped up on 
the Kiosk list that so far has remained an unsolved mystery.

There are several threads on the list regarding the fact that menu 
restrictions don't seem to apply.

Part of the problem is a bug in kiosktool, for which a workaround exists:

    http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-kiosk&m=113510108123737&w=2

That alone is not enough though. Jonathan Riddell posted a patch for Kubuntu 
which was reported to help for one person (but not for a couple of others), 
and which now seems to be hidden behind a password, so I can't access it 
anymore:

    http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-kiosk&m=113510421510080&w=2

Removing the XDG menu file also apparently helps in some cases:

    http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-kiosk&m=112376799625385&w=2

Reported troublesome distros are at least Mandriva, Gentoo, Fedora and 
Kubuntu. See these threads for some of the more recent occurrences:

    http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-kiosk&m=113508709426744&w=2
    http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-kiosk&m=113665205119576&w=2

There are many many more, but they add little or no additional information.

Does anyone feel confident enough about these issues to explain the problem 
once and for all? I have no idea how all this XDG menu stuff works, nor does 
anyone else on the Kiosk list. There's just some scattered hints and tips, 
but mostly questions and reports about it still not working right.

Also, Aaron, do you know if Kicker may be a troublemaker here? Jonathan, do 
you still have the patch available to share with the world?

Help is most appreciated.

-- 
Martijn