On Thu, 8 Aug 2002 07:35:34 -0700 Clifford Beshers <cliff.beshers@lindows.com> wrote: > At Lindows, we just assumed that our customers would want something > different from most Debian users, so we went ahead and wrote a tool to > post-process the packages and change the menu entries to what we want. > We add desktop files > for all the executables, etc. Quite a few other operations, too. > > Anyone in the company can change the category of a package by editing > a database through a web interface. I'm wondering if such a scheme > might be useful in a heterogeneous environment like Debian... That's pretty cool, and I'd love if there was a small team of people who got to decide these things :) But as it stands, it's pretty much at the maintainer's discretion; as such, something flexible enough that the menu generator for, say, KDE, can cater to its target audience and end up with one hierarchy, while the menu generator for IceWM can cater to a different audience and get a different hierarchy, would be good. It's really a non-trivial proposition, as far as management goes. As far as code goes, it's pretty easy; at one point I wrote a shell script that would prompt me to give a package some keywords, store the keywords, then spit out menu hierarchies suitable for Aptitude's categorical view. Worked really well, but I totally lost interest after assigning keywords to the first 1000 or so packages :) The result, though, was that you could find information in different ways. There were two toplevel categories; "Sorted by look 'n feel", and "Sorted by purpose". Well, here's what it looked like, briefly: /-Sorted by look 'n feel | |_KDE | | \_Calculators | | \_Generic | | \_ kcalc | |_GNOME | \_Calculators | \_Generic | \_ SNAC \-Sorted by purpose \_Calculators \_Generic |- SNAC \- kcalc You get the idea. It was actually better, but I can't remember all the details :) Anyways, I'm sure I had a point. Oh, right :) So instead of Aptitude which would display all of those trees at once, you would have a particular menu generator (say, for KDE), would pick an output hierarchy that is "friendlier" to their target audience. It would be pretty trivial to do, programatically. Lindows has pretty much standardised on KDE, and few if any of their target market will switch desktops, so I can't imagine it being such a big deal for you guys; lucky bastards ;) -- ________________________________________________________________________ \ David B. Harris, Systems administrator | http://www.terrabox.com / / eelf@sympatico.ca, elf@terrabox.com | http://eelf.ddts.net \ \======================================================================/ / Clan Barclay motto: Aut agere, aut mori. (Either action, or death.) \ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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