Hi all!
This has been a subject of discussion on IRC on and off over the last day or
two, and I figured it'd be worth bringing to the group as a whole.
At the moment, our packages are a bit all over the place in the menu system,
which can make discovery for new (and old) users difficult!
There exists a little known Ham Radio menu, which you can gain access to by
installing the package `extra-xdg-menus`. It's not a very discover-able name
for the package, but it was initially conceived as a way to allow users to
enable and disable more specific menus.
This menu groups together all packages with "HamRadio" as a category in the
.deskop file in a flat structure, listed alphabetically by their GenericName (at
least in KDE). It would be really nice to see more packages listed here!
We appear to be the only team using extra-xdg-menus, so maybe it's time for us
to split away and use the work in that to start our own hamradio-menu package?
There are entries for Electronics, but they haven't updated/looked at it in a
long old time. Alternatively, we speak to other blends and see if they want to
add to the package!
There has also been discussion of splitting the menu into subsections that
match the blend metapackages to aid user discovery of programs. This would
mean instead of having the current flow of (using qsstv as the example):
Hamradio -> qsstv
it would become
Hamradio -> Datamodes -> qsstv
Many moons ago I did the groundwork with irl so that this would be possible,
and then forgot all about it! You can find it on the anonscm server. We proved
at the time it can all work, however this would also require new categories to
be added to the .desktop file.
I'd like to see some discussion on the submenu idea - I'm all for it, but I
know that others aren't and it should really be a team decision.
I'd like to propose at some point we do a 2 week or so desktop menu sprint -
filing bugs (and patches) against programs that aren't in the HamRadio category
so we can have a nicely full HamRadio menu in Testing. At the same time we can
do a hamradio-menu package and, if agreed on, the submenus.
Questions? Comments?
Cheers,
DH