Re: Is menu orphaned?
Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de> writes:
> Bill, I'm afraid you might ignore the fact that there are many
> developers who consider menu outdated and more or less just add menu
> files to just avoid a lintian warning about a missing menu file.
Hm, which lintian warning is that? There was a wishlist bug for such a
thing, but I don't think any warning was ever committed.
> There are enough developers that would be in favour of freedesktop.org
> menus as I wrote before.
At least the Debian menu system has a documented format and standard that
everyone follows, unlike freedesktop.org where KDE, Gnome, and GNUstep
implement three subtlely different things, none of the differences are
adequately documented, and writing lintian checks for the whole thing
without stumbling over yet another strange system-specific divergence has
proven quite difficult.
> I do not think so and even if I'm lacking the time to actively work on
> menu I'm in favour of this because it works with all UIs in Debian.
Well, having had the *.desktop files in Debian thrust upon me during my
well-meaning but rather frustrating effort to merge a contributed patch to
check them with lintian, I'm surprised you all manage to put together a
coherent menu structure using them. I like the three different spellings
of ActionGame, for example, and the widespread use of categories that
aren't in the menu category standard at all (like Application).
*.desktop files are certainly a richer format and likely have more
long-term potential given that someone is at least trying to make them a
cross-environment and cross-distribution standard, but they're rather
frustrating to deal with just at the moment. Hopefully this is improving.
It would be lovely if some of the people who think that *.desktop files
are great could work with freedesktop.org to get the standard updated to
reflect reality, thus allowing people to write code against it. It's not
helpful, for example, for KDE to support an Actions keyword that isn't
documented anywhere in the standard, even though the standard has a whole
section specifically for KDE-only keywords.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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