Bug#741573: Two menu systems

[Sune Vuorela <sune@vuorela.dk>]

Hi

I think there is a couple of facts that aren't fully accurate. I'll try to 
mention them here. I'll try to keep opinions out of this mail.

On Tuesday 08 April 2014 18:30:26 Ian Jackson wrote:
> Consumers: The trad menu is already consumable by a very wide range of
> window managers etc.; the desktop menu is consumed primarily by
> desktop environments.

Note that a very wide range of window managers neither supports the trad. menu 
nor the desktop menu, but has a series of scripts to modify one or the other 
into their native format. In Debian, most of these window managers only has 
the scripts for the trad. menu, while the rest of the internet have the 
scripts that uses the desktop menu.

> Both menu systems have sufficient supporters and users that they are
> independently viable projects.  Some people will say that the trad
> menu is dead and no-one uses it, but that's clearly not true.
> Consider the package
>    http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=menu-xdg
> which provides a view of the trad menu in desktop system which
> supports the desktop (XDG) menus.

Note that the KDE Desktop task until earlier this year did install menu-xdg, 
and still does it, and the Gnome and XFCE desktops tasks also installed it at 
one point, so these numbers aren't fully usable.

> But if a maintainer wants (for example) to generate a trad menu file
> from an desktop file, then that's fine.  BUT this is ONLY PROVIDED
> that the generated trad menu file is properly confirming to the trad
> menu specification and has the descriptive text, categorisation, etc.,
> preferred by the trad menu maintainers.

As the author of desktop2menu, I can tell that in some cases it is possible to 
generate it, but in the general case it is not possible to use autogeneration. 
It is - like the help2man script - good to create a template. 

/Sune
-- 
I didn’t stop pretending when I became an adult, it’s just that when I was a 
kid I was pretending that I fit into the rules and structures of this world. 
And now that I’m an adult, I pretend that those rules and structures exist.
   - zefrank