Hello Debian maintainers, the Debian menu system have been improved in several ways during the Sarge development periods. It is time to make use of those improvements: All the changes mentionned below were made in Sarge, so there is no backport/partial upgrade issue to enact them, and no need to Depends/Conflicts on a specific version of menu now. menu files: ----------- 1) /usr/lib/menu to /usr/share/menu FHS transition: ------------------------------------------------- Please move the menu files your packages provide from /usr/lib/menu to /usr/share/menu to follow the FHS. Menu support both /usr/lib/menu and /usr/share/menu now, /usr/lib/menu having higher priority, so you can still install executable binary menufiles in /usr/lib/menu if this is needed. 2) Please capitalise properly the menu titles for consistency. (They should start by an uppercase letter). menu-methods: ------------ 3) menu now support automatic translations of menu sections, in 32 different languages and this is supported out-of-the-box by a fair number of window-manager in Sarge. Crappy snapshots here: <http://people.debian.org/~ballombe/menu-snapshot> For the remaining wm, the menu-method need to set 'outputencoding' to the encoding expected by the wm hen reading the menu. In practice, there are 4 values in use: outputencoding="ASCII" The window manager only handle 7bit ASCII files. outputencoding="ISO-8859-1" The window manager assume the menu is in ISO-8859-1. outputencoding="UTF-8" The window manager assume the menu is in UTF-8. outputencoding="LOCALE" The window manager assume the menu is encoded in the current locale charset. (This should be avoided since it is not very robust). Please check the window-manager default fonts actually handle CJK encodings. 4) If your window manager support XDG menus, you can Depends on menu-xdg instead of providing a menu-method. In that case make sure the .menu files you ship display the Debian menu. menu-xdg generate multilingual .directory files translated in 32 languages. 5) Other changes I cannot remember right now. Acknowledgement: --------------- I am in debt to Morten Brix Pedersen for contributing most of the Debian menu improvement during the development of Sarge. menu-xdg was written and is maintained by Chris Cheney. Future: ------- I have plans for the future, in particular replacing the hints code by something more robust, better menu icon support, fully translatable menu and generic menu name, but this will depend on the support I will receive. If you want to contribute, please join us on <http://alioth.debian.org/projects/menu>. Cheers, -- Bill. <ballombe@debian.org> Imagine a large red swirl here.
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