Bug#741573: Two menu systems
On Thursday 10 April 2014 14:06:11 Ian Jackson wrote:
> Has anyone described any actual difficulties with supporting the
> traditional menu ?
I am in the uploaders field of packages that probably requires 300 menu files to
be available and of one consumer of "menus".
if it takes 5 minutes to write a menu file and 5 minutes to switch to one of
those 'old style' window managers and test that it shows up as it should, it
is 3000 minutes. Or 1 hour per week in a year. And I guess that on some
uploads, it should be tested again that it still shows up as it should. if
that happens once pr year pr package, it is 30 minutes pr week pr year.
Isn't that time better spent elsewhere?
>From the 'consumer' point of view. I have been of the opinion that as long as
the Debian menu is *the* thing documented in the policy, consumers should
display the Debian menu. I even at one point put my time where my mouth was
and wrote the desktop2menu tool available in devscripts to help the Debian
menu.
But for various reasons[0], I don't think the Debian Menu is the thing to show
to most users. And we should get policy fixed to allow this, which is why I
filed the initial bug+patch that later actually got consensus thru the normal
policy process, and was heading into the policy until Bill Allombert short
circuited the policy process in order to defend his kingdom.
And if one shouldn't 'consume' the menu, why should one provide data for it?
[2]
No. It is not difficult. It is just work. And give a bad experience to users.
And once again, I'll link to the tool by Arch that builds menus based upon the
.desktop files that fits in many 'old style' window managers.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xdg-menu
/Sune
[0]
- it is ugly (see the icon format subthread, for example)
- it duplicates the entries already provided by the desktop files
- the menu-xdg package generates categories that icon themes doesn't have
icons for and the menu-xdg maintainer refuses to fix it
- it contains useless entries for many things that helps hiding what you look
for [1]
- having two similar menu structures is confusing.
[1] Shells and interactive interpreters and such.
[2] afaik, the gnome maintainers have added code to the gnome menu building
thing that does foreach desktopfile in desktopfiles {
if(!desktopfile.path.contains("menu-xdg")) addtomenu(desktopfile); }
I am planning something similar for the kdelibs menu building code.
--
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
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