xfdesktop always parses menu.xml as UTF-8 but this means that you can't then refer to files (e.g. icons/executables) which are on the filesystem in iso-8859-1 say. Even changing the xml definition at the top of the file didn't alter this behaviour. Does menu.xml always have to be utf-8? Is there a workaround for referring to this sort of files other than asking people ot store them as utf-8 on their filesystems? The sort of error messages generated are: ** (xfdesktop:28650): WARNING **: XfceDesktopMenu: Error parsing xfdesktop menu file (0): Error on line 150 char 1: Invalid UTF-8 encoded text
Yes, the file needs to be in UTF-8 (the GMarkup parser doesn't support anything else, IIRC). This probably means that what should happen is any file name in the 'cmd' or 'icon' attributes should be converted to the filesystem encoding before trying to open the file.
Ok, cmd= gets converted into the filesystem encoding before using it. I'm not going to do icon=, as I think GtkIconTheme handles this.