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

[Sam Hartman <hartmans@mit.edu>]

Ian, I'd like to encourage you to use less loaded words than "destroy."
When I hear that term and disagree with your analysis, my emotional
reaction is strong enough that I stop reading.
Your term is loaded enough that you lose the opportunity to try and get
me to think about whether you are right.
If your goal is to ask us to think about your position and engage in
reasoned discourse, you would be better served with more factual, less
emotional statements.
I understand that the emotional content is important too.  I'd recommend
carrying that by talking about your own emotional state rather than
using emotional words about the concept.
For example when I heard you describe that you were so upset you needed
to leave the conversation at Debconf, I heard someone being open and
honest about how much they care about the issue.

I think I may be following what Ian's saying.


If we adopt Keith's proposal without updating policy 9.6--we retainIs
the SHOULD have menu entries for all command line apps, but move the
metadata format to .desktop, we have a number of problems.  We have no
way to express the category information and some of the other metadata
from the trad menu that's kind of important for its expanded scope.

So, it's not clear what should happen.

If we revise 9.6 and  adopt Keith's proposal then we're basically
adopting the XDG menu's scope, but taking away the place where the
broader information could go.

In effect we leave menu entries that do belong on the trad menu but do
not belong on the XDG menu no where.

Depending on how we do things we may also significantly complicate the
runtime dependencies of light-weight windowmanagers if we force them to
parse .desktop files and do image conversion.


In effect by adopting Keith's proposal with an update to 9.6, we're
saying that as a matter of technical policy decided by the TC, there are
some menu entries on the trad menu that do not belong on any menu at
all.

We're leaving the specifics to the individual maintainers.  However, I
can see that if you value the scope of the trad menu, you'd be really
frustrated by that  decision.