Re: Debian menu system update
On Thu, 2003-05-29 at 06:42, Bill Allombert wrote:
> On Wed, May 28, 2003 at 07:20:11PM -0500, Chris Cheney wrote:
> > Is the Debian menu system going to convert to using the freedesktop
> > menu spec?
> >
> > http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/menu/draft/menu-spec/menu-spec.html
> >
> > As far as I know both Gnome and KDE follow it and possibly others.
>
> I have read this standard again and again and I have trouble to
> see how far it is relevant to the Debian menu system:
Primarily because the rest of the world has settled on the .desktop
format as the standard for menus. The whole idea with .desktop was to
supplant the myriad incompatible menu systems used by various
distributors.
Third party software developers nowadays are going to be writing
.desktop files, and dropping them in /usr/share/applications. I doubt
that very many at all are going to go to the trouble of learning
Debian's menu system and writing an additional menu entry for it.
And more and more upstream packages are coming with .desktop files now;
why should I have to write a Debian menu file when my package comes with
a perfectly good .desktop menu file?
Finally, in general we should be pushing as much of Debian packaging
work on upstream as possible, and this definitely includes the menu
entries. With the .desktop format we actually have a chance of doing
that. With Debian's menu format it's just not going to happen.
> You can generate .desktop from menu file using a menu-method (already
> donee).
This appears to currently be a lossy translation; AFAICS the i18n
support is lost.
> The .menu file needed for Debian need not to be autogenerated.
>
> What more do you want the Debian menu system to do ?
We hashed this out a while back on the list; the Debian menu system
should provide a transition from Debian menu entries to .desktop files.
It should be able to accept .desktop files natively.
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