Re: Soften the the wording recommending menu files: let's do it in Jessie.

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Charles Plessy wrote:

> On the other hand, it is the spirit of Debian to accept low-maintenance patches
> (in that case, menu entries) when it can help other projects even if one does
> not care for it.  In that sense, if the Debian Menu has an active user base, it
> would be counter-productive to kill it with a top-down decision.

I don't think no longer documenting the old Debian menu system (or
moving the documentation to an appendix) would kill it or be a
top-down decision.  After all, if policy does not say that I *should*
add a menu entry, that does not stop me from adding one if I want to.

Currently Debian has two menu systems.  The old Debian menu system is
nice because there is clear documentation about how to add your
program to it and as a result for a while it was a pretty complete
menu.

Alas, now that completeness is eroding and I don't see much reason to
recommend in policy to continue to add entries, unless we have clear
advice about when packagers should include an entry in it and when
they should add to the fdo menu instead.

As far as I can tell, the de facto policy is just to add to the fdo
menu when appropriate.  The documented policy is failing to describe
that actual practice.  Is there some subtlety I'm missing?

Thanks,
Jonathan