Hello Sam, Sorry for the delay. I had to re-read the bug log again. tl;dr I think that a consensus was reached and my concerns have been addressed in #707851. I have mainly participated in this discussion because I have gained some insight into the Debian menu versus XDG situation while I was working on https://wiki.debian.org/Games/JessieReleaseGoal It was important for me that the Debian menu is still mentioned as an alternative menu system, for reasons I would like to summarize again. I think much of the controversity could have been avoided if people had refrained from phrases like "getting rid of or killing" the menu system and instead had discussed the original proposal "to soften the wording recommending menu files" as a first step, because we are not ready for step two yet. Removing the Debian menu system at this point in time would be a unnecessary regression but it should be a goal for the future. I recommend that the TC confirms the outcome of the discussion in bug #707851 but also reaffirms that the Debian menu is still an alternative menu system. That means menu file patches should be accepted and current packages should not drop them. The TC should also encourage maintainers to accept patches to implement the XDG spec, to ship desktop files and to work on the goal to unify the desktop appearance for all desktop users in Debian by improving the support for this specification for all window managers and desktop environments. The second step would be to package tools like archlinux-xdg-menu or awesome-freedesktop and has been mentioned before, https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XdgMenu https://github.com/terceiro/awesome-freedesktop and to create a Lintian warning for missing desktop files and to fix those issues. As soon as the Freedesktop Standard is widely adopted by the majority of window managers and desktop environments and the vast majority of applications ship desktop files, we could phase out the Debian menu and eventually "get rid of" menu files for good. I completely agree that the Policy should recommend the Freedesktop Specification because it is de facto standard for all major desktop environments. It is also widely supported across different distributions and nowadays application developers exclusively provide desktop files for their programs. I have never observed anything different. This is the most important argument for changing the Policy because it should reflect the reality and common practice. The synergy effects with upstream developers and other distributions are enormous. I believe the current wording is sensible, at least how I interpret it, because it strikes a balance between the above mentioned reality and the fact that the Debian menu is still useful for lightweight window manager setups where it is known to integrate well and where it provides value for users. The user base is not as large as it is for GNOME or KDE but it is not insignificant either which can be verified by looking at popcon statistics for Fluxbox, Openbox or IceWM, just to mention a few of the 40+ window managers in Debian. In my opinion Bill's concerns are addressed by ensuring that the Debian menu is still considered as an alternative as long as the XDG menu does not provide the same value for window manager setups. Someone has to do the work and investigate how many WM's really support the XDG menu and package the required tools to make the Debian menu superfluous. Although I sympathise with Bill's general approach to keep the Debian menu system for the time being, I do not agree with his actions to revert Charles' changes unilaterally. I cannot imagine a better and more thorough way to conduct such a Policy change and Charles really tried to incorporate the comments and even asked on debian-devel for more input. Some comments to statements about the Debian menu ================================================= 1. It is not hard to test menu files. You can install Openbox and the menu package alongside Gnome3 for example and switch between the two. It is also trivial to verify the validity of a menu file by using visual inspection. 2. Menu files are not hard to maintain. In fact under normal circumstances you will never have to touch them again and dh_installmenu is a great helper. 3. 95 source packages from the games specific release goal do not ship desktop files but they still support menu files. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=pkg-games-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org;tag=desktop-integration I only know the games situation but there might be a lot more packages that still don't support the XDG spec. I presume the KDE, GNOME and Xfce folks would also like to see this changed. Here we should begin. Regards, Markus
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