Tk will clone menu widgets when they are torn off and
it gives them names at are similar to the original
widget's names.  The patch extends the nametowidget so
it will return the original widget when given the name
of a cloned widget.  We used this patch to provide
balloon help in cloned menus.  This patch isn't
perfect, it will fail on clones of clones, but it is a
big help.

This patch was made against the latest CVS version
1.173 of Tkinter.py but works against older
Tkinter.py's too.

     - Greg Couch

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I don't believe that the naming convention of cloned menus is actually documented anywhere (it's certainly not documented in menu(n) of tk-8.3.5 as packaged by RedHat.  The only promise that the documentation makes is that the clone "is a child of the original". (but that can be violated if "menu clone" is invoked directly:

% menu .m
.m
% .m clone .n
%
)

That said, the convention for automatically generated clones hasn't varied in the versions of Tk I'm aware of (at least 8.2 through 8.4) so it might be reasonable to depend on this.

Does anybody in Python development also keep up with Tcl/Tk development?  It might be reasonable to ask them to document the format of automatically generated clone names.

Eh.. old.
Anyway, I have made a patch against trunk now and it should work with
any nested level of cloned menus according to how tk names cloned menus.

A small simple patch that I see no problems with.

Can someone post a script demonstrating the proposed feature?  Is "clones of clones" issue mentioned by OP resolved in the latest patch?

Given that nobody commented on this issue for 7 years, I am skeptical about the utility of this feature.