Bug#741573: Proposed draft of ballot to resolve menu/desktop question

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 10:01:27PM -0700, Keith Packard a écrit :
> 
> Thinking about this tonight, I've rewritten option D as AB + patch.
 
> OPTION D':
> 
> Using its power under §6.1.1 to decide on any matter of technical
> policy, and its power under §6.1.5 to offer advice:
> 
>    1. The Technical Committee adopts the changes proposed by Charles
>       Plessy in ba679bff[1].
> 
>    2. In addition to those changes, the Technical Committee resolves
>       that packages providing a .desktop file shall not also provide a
>       menu file for the same application.
> 
>    3. We further resolve that "menu programs" should not depend on the
>       Debian Menu System and should instead rely on .desktop file
>       contents for constructing a list of applications to present to
>       the user.
> 
>    4. We advise the maintainers of the 'menu' package to update that
>       package to reflect this increased focus on .desktop files by
>       modifying the 'menu' package to use .desktop files for the
>       source of menu information in addition to menu files.
> 
>    5. Discussion of the precise relationship between menu file
>       section/hints values and .desktop file Categories values may be
>       defined within the Debian Menu sub-policy and Debian Menu
>       System.
> 
>    6. Further modifications to the menu policy are allowed using the
>       normal policy modification process.
> 
> [1]: http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/dbnpolicy/policy.git/commit/?id=ba679bff76f5b9152f43d5bc901b9b3aad257479

Thanks a lot, Keith, I think that this is much clearer and integrates very well
in the ballot.

Minor points follow, but I am happy with the current ballot and do not want
to introduce further delays.

 - When I asked for acknowledgement, I was reffering not to the Policy patch,
   but to the wiki page from 2008 <https://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/DebianMenuUsingDesktopEntries>.
   However, if option D' does not contain anymore the transition plan of option D,
   there is no need to mention the wiki page anymore.

 - Since the only difference between options A and B is a statement on the
   Policy process that is orthogonal to the technical decision on the menu, I
   would recommend to just drop option B.  This is in line with the fact that
   option D' here is following A.1 and not B.1. 

Have a nice day,

Charles

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan