Bug#741573: Proposed draft of ballot to resolve menu/desktop question
Didier 'OdyX' Raboud writes ("Bug#741573: Proposed draft of ballot to resolve menu/desktop question"):
> Right. But the 'trad Debian menu' (as outlined in Policy §9.6) has never
> reached the point where "applications that need not be passed any
> special command line arguments for normal operation" have a menu entry.
I'm not sure why you think this is relevant.
Policy says every command line program should have a manpage, but we
have many many command line programs without. That a project's
coverage isn't complete is not a reason to throw it away.
> I disagree that this is the real dispute: today, the trad Debian menu
> application metadata database is de facto already of less relevance than
> the (not-in-policy) the XDG Menu, by orders of magnitude.
I don't understand why you think that something being of `less
relevance' means it should be destroyed.
> > (a) continue to be maintained in its existing file format
> >
> > (b) be translated to a new and more modern file format
> > (perhaps only for some packages)
> >
> > (c) be destroyed.
> >
> > Given that there are people who want to maintain it, I think (c) is
> > unacceptable.
>
> Keith's proposal doesn't imply that the trad menu would "be destroyed"
> (your words),
It does. There is nothing in Keith's proposal which preserves the
existing trad menu metadata. According to `apt-file search' that is a
database of 2296 menu entries (in wheezy).
> On the other hand, if there are not enough users and maintainers for the
> trad menu, I do find it unacceptable to further impose on all
> maintainers (through a Policy "should") the burden of maintaining this
> redundant metadata database, which is nowadays _de_facto_ replaced by
> the technically superior XDG Menu.
The XDG menu database does not contain a menu entry for many things
that the trad menu does. And this is intentional. So it is not a
replacement.
Ian.
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