Re: Gnome menu customization best practices?
On Sat, 2 Oct 2004, Ian Murdock wrote:
I've spent several days googling and experimenting with Gnome VFS
and the Gnome panel trying to come up with a way to easily customize
the Gnome menus for Componentized Linux in a way that 1. doesn't
violate Debian policy; and 2. diverges from Debian as little as
possible.
My first question would be here, whether it would be possible to use
the Debian menu system. (Well, at first it has to be fixed to consider
user menus ... Bill?)
One constraint is that, because CL is a toolkit for
building custom distros, we want to make it easy for distro
builders to provide their own custom menus. So, ideally, it's as
simple as providing a package that supplies the custom menus,
similarly to the cl-branding mechanism I outlined in the last message.
Even more ideally, we can jointly come up with a way to do it that
works for all CDDs and that can submitted to Debian proper post-sarge.
This would be very interesting. IMHO there are two ways to provide
a custom menu if you would like to stick to the Debian menu system:
1. Change the Debian menu the way you want it to be. This has the
drawback, that all users get this changed menu which is not
neccessarily the way it is intended.
2. Create an independant user menu which has not the drawback from
above. I do not know whether there is an option to hide the
default Debian menu completely in this case and thus replacing the
menu completely. The creation of user menus coul probably enhanced
by a caching mechanism which stores the user menu items in a kind
of cache because for large system this menu system creation would
not scale very good.
IMHO, the second way is the way we should prefer, but it might need fixing
for some user interfaces - especially for Gnome (it works for KDE and
a certain amount of window managers).
There are two ways to customize the Gnome menus: 1. editing the files in
/etc/gnome-vfs-2.0/vfolders (and, in particular,
applications-all-users.vfolder-info and
preferences-all-users.vfolder-info, which specify the Applications and
Preferences menus, respectively); and 2. editing the .desktop
files supplied by the Debian packages to change the categories, which
determine where in the menus the menu items appear (and that's
assuming the custom distro is happy with the default menu structure).
If I'm not wrong then these files are not under control of the Debian
menu system but influence Gnome / KDE (freedesktop.org) menus directly.
If you ask me we should rather try to provide an interface between
Debian menu system and freedesktop.org menus.
...
So, it seems like the best way forward is to divert the .desktop files
in /usr/share/applications, but I'm not particularly keen on doing this
either, as I'll have to divert dozens and dozens of files, and I still
don't have a way of changing the menu structure if I want to do that.
I think both approaches are changing the menu for all users and do
not have the option to provide different menus for different user
roles.
Kind regards
Andreas.
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