Bug#741573: Proposed draft of ballot to resolve menu/desktop question
Le jeudi, 27 août 2015, 18.11:56 Ian Jackson a écrit :
> The trad Debian menu, and the XDG menu files as found in existing
> desktop applications, do not agree on either
> (i) the scope of the menu
Right. But the 'trad Debian menu' (as outlined in Policy §9.6) has never
reached the point where "applications that need not be passed any
special command line arguments for normal operation" have a menu entry.
I think this never happened mostly because having that metadata is plain
useless for vast amounts of "applications" we have under {/usr},/bin.
The other reason is also that the XDG menu has been adopted by most
major desktop environments, and is perceived as vastly more useful
(multiple sized icons, translation, etc).
Finally, my /usr/share/menu/ has _89_ entries, where I have 419 .desktop
entries under /usr/share/applications (for 4325 installed packages, and
4214 executables in /usr/bin). So, as of today, this part of policy is
de facto _not_ followed.
> So the real dispute is: should the existing application metadata
> database (currently represented by the Debian trad menu files in
> existing packages)
I disagree that this is the real dispute: today, the trad Debian menu
application metadata database is de facto already of less relevance than
the (not-in-policy) the XDG Menu, by orders of magnitude.
> (a) continue to be maintained in its existing file format
>
> (b) be translated to a new and more modern file format
> (perhaps only for some packages)
>
> (c) be destroyed.
>
> Given that there are people who want to maintain it, I think (c) is
> unacceptable.
Keith's proposal doesn't imply that the trad menu would "be destroyed"
(your words), but would indeed imply that the trad menu system would
need to make use of the de-facto more relevant XDG Menu. If there are
_enough_ people that use the trad Debian menu system, I am confident
that this _will_ happen.
On the other hand, if there are not enough users and maintainers for the
trad menu, I do find it unacceptable to further impose on all
maintainers (through a Policy "should") the burden of maintaining this
redundant metadata database, which is nowadays _de_facto_ replaced by
the technically superior XDG Menu.
I think phrasing the question in terms of "there is this existing
database, how should it be transformed" is misleading, whereas I see the
question as "which metadata databases make sense for the future of
Debian".
Cheers,
OdyX
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