(menu.info)Section 2.1

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2.1 How/when do the window manager startup files get created?
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Basically, users don't need to know any of how and when the startup
files are created, but they might be interested to know anyway.

When a package that wants to add something to the menu tree gets
installed, it will run 'update-menus' in its 'postinst' script.
Update-menus then reads in all menu files in '/etc/menu/',
'/usr/lib/menu', '/usr/share/menu' and '/usr/share/menu/default', and
stores the menu entries of all installed packages in memory.  Once that
has been done, it will run the menu-methods in '/etc/menu-methods/*',
and pipe the information about the menu entries to the menu-methods on
stdout, so that the menu-methods can read this.  Each window-manager or
other program that wants to have the Debian menu tree, will supply a
menu-method script in '/etc/menu-methods/'.  This menu-method then knows
how to generate the startup-file for that window manager.  To facilitate
this task for the window-manager maintainers, menu provides a
'install-menu' program.  This program can generate the startupfiles for
just about every window manager.