Re: missing menuentries (Was: Articles mentioning Debian)

[joostje@debian.org]

Joey Hess wrote:
> john@dhh.gt.org wrote:
> > How general?  Should I create menu entries for text-only packages?  
> 
> Yes if they are interactive and can be used w/o passing in any special
> parameters.

And, even Virtual-Console only packages can have menuetries, due
to Joey's pdmenu package. You'll specify the `needs=VC', and menu[1]
`knows' only to use those entries for pdmenu, running on a
VC (or any other menuing system that allows for VC's).

So, in general, yes, (nearly) every programme that can usfully be
started without special parameters, have a menuentry.
It doesn't even have to be interactive (flipscreen etc).

I wasn't aware that there are still very many packages that don't have
a menuentry (I only use a very small and conservative set of pacakges,
nor do I use the menu system myself).

If there still are many such packages, maybe it's again usefull to
make use of the /usr/lib/menu/default directory, that is used if
a package doesn't provide their own menuentry file.
Are there people on this list willing to go and search for packages
without menuentries, and create them? Those menuentries should then
be send in a bugreport to the corresponding package, but in the mean
time, I can include them in /usr/lib/menu/default/*, assuming the list
is substantial (100 or more menuentries). That would make Debian
more friendly for the first-time user. Any takers?

[1] No, it's not really menu that does this, it's pdmenu that instructs
    menu to create various startup files, for VC and X etc.

joostje@debian.org