programmatic addition of sub-menu hierarchy onto kicker panel?

[Stephen Dowdy]

I want to make a script that will install a sub-menu tree on the
kicker panel that contains several other sub-menus each with several
applications. (specifically, for this purpose, it's a sub-menu of remote
terminal applications where the top-level contains a list of "sites" as
directories, and each site contains a remote-terminal for all systems at
that site.  But, i'll want to do more generalized mods later)

In rooting around my home directory after doing it with 'kmenuedit', i've
discovered that the relevant files were created in:

~/.local/share/applications/{application}.desktop
~/.local/share/applications/desktop-directories/{submenus}.directory

and the binding between sub-menus and the applications contained in
them are in ~/.config/menus/applications-kmenuedit.menu

(I would have figured that a "directory" file would contain all the
sub-components, rather than requiring the applications-kmenuedit.menu
file to bind the bits together, but oh well.)

Anyway, this all seems a bit complicated to manage via shell scripts.
(and error-prone, with possible clash possibilities if files are edited
by the script)

I did run across 'xdg-utils' at freedesktop.org, but i can't count on
those being installed on the systems my end-users are using.  (And, it
seems when i installed GoogleEarth it managed to add interfaces in
KMenu, so i'm wondering if kdebase has the necessary components to
script this)  [[ Ah, now that i look, it appears the googleearth installer
is bundled with the xdg-utils ]]

Is there some other obvious easier way to manage this type of setup
using the tools that come on Debian Sarge/Etch in kdebase?.  Is there
a good documentation resource on doing this?
(i've also tried 'dcop kicker Panel addServiceMenuButton foo.directory'
to no avail, other than it creating an unusabled "Folder" menu)

thanks,
--stephen
-- 
Stephen Dowdy  -  Systems Administrator  -  NCAR/RAL
303.497.2869   -  sdowdy at ucar.edu        -  http://www.ral.ucar.edu/~sdowdy/

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