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Re: Menu system rewrite update (Aug 6 2002)



On Wed, 7 Aug 2002 14:37:45 -0500
Chris Lawrence <lawrencc@debian.org> wrote:
> > * draft_policy.txt: a first-cut of a draft menu policy.

I read this and I've got a few concerns.

One, /usr/share/applications/. Can't /usr/share/menu/ or
/usr/share/menu-files/ or /usr/share/debian-menu/ or _something_ like
that be done? I tell ya, it really irritated me when I looked in
/usr/share/apps and didn't find any apps. (This was ages ago when I was
first learning about *nix in general)

KDE uses /usr/share/applnk/; while somewhat obfuscated, at least there
isn't an obvious namespace conflict.

The categorisations are gonna be a bitch too, no doubt. I think we've
all learnt that static hierarchies just aren't feasible in the long run.

So, instead, I'd like to suggest the "Groups" field contain the
following bits of information:

Toolkit/desktop, General type(application/monitor/system
administration), specific tasks/properties.

The last one, "specific tasks/properties" would be a list of keywords.
ie: the interactive/CLI calculator bc(1) might have
"calculator(general), math". The entire Groups field might be
"commandline, shell, calculator(general), math". It provides something
typically considered a shell (ie: interactive, realine-type interface),
it can also be strictly CLI-driven, and it's a generic calculator.

units(1) might be "commandline, shell, calculator(units)". Gnumeric
might be "gnome; application; business, financial, spreadsheet,
calculator(general), math".

There's no reason why a particular menu entry needs to appear only once.
In fact, it makes sense for an entry to be in multiple places if it
actually FITS in multiple places :) Of course, you'd end up having
really large menus if you had lots of applications installed. But then
again, you would anyways. I'd say it would be up to the menu-method
itself to decide in how many categories a particular entry would appear;
the keyword list could be listed in order of most importance to least
importance. Gnumeric's would robably be "business, spreadsheet,
financial, calculator(general), math" in that case.

Just my two bits :)

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