Mark Howard wrote:
Discussions on debian-devel about the menu in the past seem to have turned into flame wars about what technology we should be using - did any good come out of this? Even if nothing is being done to improve the menu package, or possibly standardise it, I think that a lot can be done from the gnome side of things right now. Why do we have a separate Debian section at the bottom of the menu? Why isn't it integrated into the main sections of the menu?
About 18 months ago, I started on a project to get Debian's menus converted to the FreeDesktop.org standard, but ran out of Copious Free Time to get anything much accomplished on it.
Converting from Debian menu files to .desktop files isn't very hard... the hard part is solving some serious usability problems that crop up when you try to shoehorn hundreds of Debian menu entries into the default menu structures used by KDE and GNOME. I proposed a solution called "Groups" that worked like Debian menu hints on steroids, but it wasn't popular with the XDG folks.
If there's interest, I can dig out the code and policy drafts I put together and we can try to revive it.
Chris -- Chris Lawrence <lawrencc@debian.org> - http://blog.lordsutch.com/