Re: LXDE doesnt support Debian Menu
David Paleino <d.paleino@gmail.com> writes:
> On Thu, 26 Feb 2009 12:36:07 +0100 (CET), Andreas Tille wrote:
>> and at the same time fix all packages that only have a menu but no
>> desktop file."
> This could easily be added as a lintian check, I believe.
FWIW, the reason why Lintian doesn't have such a check is because of
previous rants on debian-devel about how horrible the menu entries are and
how they don't want that stuff in the freedesktop.org menu.
What I think we really need here is some clear proposal that specifies:
* What programs should get a menu entry?
* What categorization of menu entries should be used?
* How do check programs correctly verify the menu files in the package?
* How do systems that don't use freedesktop.org build menus?
If we're going to follow the freedesktop.org standard, that would be
great, but it should be permissible to then mass-file bugs on packages
that provide .desktop files and don't follow the standard (which, I'll
warn, is a lot of them). Right now, there's quite a lot of mess in the
.desktop files, categories that aren't listed in the standard, and so
forth.
I personally would be quite happy to see elimination of the menu *file
format* in favor of .desktop files on the grounds that the fewer
Debian-specific things we invent, the better. However, the *capability*
of the menu system for non-freedesktop.org environments needs to be
preserved somehow. If we can do that by converting freedesktop.org
.desktop files to the existing menu methods, I think that's a fine
solution, but the .desktop files will need to support roughly the same set
of features.
I think this is an entirely doable project, but I also think it's a lot of
work, and a lot of the work is in putting together a clear proposal and
getting consensus. Right now, my impression is that no one is really
doing that and instead just implementing what they feel looks best in
their environment with the applications that they get bug reports about,
which is resulting in a lot of chaos and inconsistency.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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