On Thu, Dec 04, 2003 at 03:44:56PM -0500, Nathanael Nerode wrote: > Andrew Suffield wrote: > >That wasn't his argument. However, it's similar, and the response is > >the same: why not simply add these features to the Debian menu system? > > Why be gratuitously different? Why not? Why waste effort just to be the same as everybody else? It's identical to the old rpm vs. deb argument. > There's now a standard used by KDE and GNOME which has more features than the > Debian menu system. > > Which makes more sense: > > * Investing time in adding features to the Debian menu system, keeping maximum > menu work on the Debian maintainers, retaining poor GNOME and KDE > integration, and generally competing with the freedesktop standard > > * Adopting the freedesktop standard and absorbing its benefits for GNOME and > KDE users immediately, while benefiting from upstream work This is the fallacy of the false dilemma. > Frankly, I'm not clear why there's opposition to adopting the freedesktop > draft specifications in Debian. > > Are there any technical complaints about it? (Apart from "I don't like > the .desktop extension", which I consider unimportant.) It doesn't support anything but gnome or kde. We have a system that works for everything, and it is unlikely that anybody else will go to that much trouble. > Perhaps a "backward-compatability-menu" module could be written to > automagically generate Debian menu entries from .desktop entries. If this > would satisfy everyone's complaints, I'll write the damn thing. That's half of what is needed (to support gnome and kde within the debian menu system). The other half is the reverse conversion - take the upstream .desktop file, and convert it to a debian manu entry. That supports everything other than gnome and kde. It should be pretty easy - they're simple text files. Adding the extra features that .desktop files have should also be pretty easy, if not trivial. They aren't exactly sophisticated - just some more string fields to pass through. None of that should be more than an afternoon's work, all together. Converting debian over to use .desktop files exclusively would be significantly more work for no real gain. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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