The current menu is missing an important entry that is a category for the settings. Maybe it just needs a proper .menu file, that would be easy.
Yes, I'm not really sure how you fix this. Should be panel ship its own menu and directory files or can we move the ones from xfdesktop to a more generic place.
(cc brian)
Probably move it to a more generic place. I'd say ship with garcon, but I guess garcon is supposed to be desktop-neutral.
I can suggest xfce-utils, and fallback to a dummy menu (hard-coded prolly) if there is no such file available, and make this work the same for the panel plugin and the desktop.
I'm putting this as critical as I believe this has to be fixed before Xfce 4.8.0 gets released. And if we are all alright, the thing to do will be to use a default file installed (through xfce-utils) under $prefix/etc/xdg/menus/xfce4-applications.menu and otherwise fallback on a default (hard-coded) menu with just the list of applications (what about the log-out/shutdown entry? should probably be included as well). And why wouldn't garcon provide generic menus?
Jannis, do you have any problems with moving this to garcon? It is (from a dependency point of view) the best place, since both xfdesktop and xfce4-panel don't depend on xfce-utils (and they shouldn't). Another option would be libxfce4ui.
Hmm. Theoretically, garcon isn't the right place for desktop-specific files. But if we prefixed them with 'xfce-' (like xfce-applications.menu) I'd be ok with it.
Ok, I'll move them (and prefix them when needed) tomorrow and commit it in garcon.
Ok all the data has been moved. .menu and .directory files are in Garcon and the .desktop files moved to the package they belong to (either xfce-utils or xfce4-session).