Re: Adding installed packages to menu

[Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>]

On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 01:15:52AM +0900, Bret Busby <bret@busby.net> was heard to say:
> But the issue with that, is that, if the package maintainer made a  
> deliberate determination to not have the package management  
> automatically add the package to the menu, why then would the Ubuntu  
> package management have automatically added the package to the menu  
> hierarchy?

  The *Debian* package maintainer apparently chose not to add the
package to the menu.  The *Ubuntu* maintainer may have chosen
otherwise.  BTW, it would be easier to discuss this if we knew which
package you were talking about (since there's apparently a particular
one).  e.g., then someone could tell you exactly why it's not ending
up in the menu.

> That the Ubuntu package manager (I believe that I used the Ubuntu  
> Synaptic to install the package and its dependencies) automatically  
> added the package to the Applications menu hierarchy, in the  
> installation process, and the Debian 4.0 Synaptic package manager did  
> not automatically add the package to the Applications menu hierarchy, in  
> the installation process, indicates to me that the difference is due to  
> the difference in the package management between the two systems, rather  
> than a determinitive action of a package manager (unless the package  
> incorporates some switch that says "add to the menu in Ubuntu, but not  
> in Debian").

  The package management system has absolutely no specific knowledge of
menu systems, desktop environments, or anything like that.  The only
ways that packages end up in the global menu are:

  (a) packages ship menu files in the appropriate directories, and
  (b) packages invoke update-menus in their post-install script (or
      via a trigger; I don't know offhand if we've transitioned to that
      in lenny)  Packages using the Gnome menu system don't even need
      this step, if I remember correctly.

  Daniel