Bug#741573: Proposed draft of ballot to resolve menu/desktop question
Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> - defining new field names for .desktop files to contain
> the trad menu metadata, as necessary. I think we can safely
> call these fields X-Debian-* or X-Debian-Menu-* or something.
What is the use case for these fields?
> - a small amount of work in the already-existing .desktop-to-menu
> conversion program
Who cares? We can have much better than that and use the XDG
specification to its full extent:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xdg-menu
> - policy should probably say that a contributor sending a trad menu
> patch for a program with a .desktop file should do so by sending
> a .desktop file patch, rather than a trad menu patch.
Good. This way it can be ignored as well.
> In the longer term:
>
> - Desktop program maintainers would get occasional patches to add
> trad menu metadata to their .desktop files. The tooling would then
> do the right thing. This is the only extra human work that those
> maintainers would have to do.
So you complain that dropping entirely the Debian menu (which is the
sensible thing to do) would get rid of a few thousands
mostly-boilerplate files, while we get rid of much more than that in
useless C code every other minor release, but suddenly giving extra work
to all maintainers of packages containing desktop entries is OK?
Maybe some people need to get rid of that mentality where other people
have to do more work to comply with their twisted view of reality.
> - GUI program maintainers have a choice of whether to provide trad
> menu entries via this new mechanism or by providing a separate trad
> menu file.
Or to do nothing at all about the trad menu, which is the sensible thing
to do?
> - Maintainers of non-GUI programs which don't want to be in the DE
> menus can continue to provide menu entries for the trad menu
> without needing to interact with the XDG menu system.
Or they can provide entries with appropriate
NoDisplay/OnlyShowIn/NotShowIn fields, as described in Charles’ proposed
policy.
> - Trad menu consumers do not need to gain any heavyweight runtime
> dependencies.
Neither do they need to by using xdg_menu.
> - It is still possible to make the trad menu visible in DEs using the
> existing technique.
No, it is not. Maybe in an alternative reality, but in Debian, KDE and
GNOME have both made this impossible, on purpose.
There is no use for the traditional Debian menu. It is deadweight
technology. Any effort invested in it is wasted. Get over it.
--
Joss
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