Re: Applications menu for Fvwm

[Christian Linhart <clinhart@ping.at>]

First, I think it's an excellent idea to provide an automatically
configured wm-menu. This will make the use of the system a lot more
user friendly.

I have a small proposal how this can be achieved
in a way independent of the window manager and of the installation
sequence.

I think we should use a generic installer script (install-menu).
This script can then call the window-manager specific scripts.

Additionally, install-menu can enter the menu-entries into a database
(an ascii file like /var/lib/dpkg/status will be sufficient).
This is necessary for the case that a window manager gets installed
*after* most of the packages. When a window manager gets installed,
it can initialize its config files with the entries of this database. 

Install-menu must be an essential package for this to work out OK.
This shouldn't be a problem since it won't be large (probably 
only a small perl-script)

Now, I can think of some open questions:
* What information should be provided to install-menu ?
  This must be enough information such that all window managers
  are happy with it.

* Interaction with dpkg, e.g., should install-menu be integrated
  into dpkg ?

* Should we use the package section as the name of the menu ?
  (This will be more consistent and thus probably easier for the user)

* Who writes it ? 
  [I know that I'm kind of volunteering for it when I ask this
  question ;-)]

--
Christian Linhart <clinhart@ping.at, chris@debian.org>
Software Development * Internetworking * Linux&GNU Support
snail-mail: Wagingerstraße 12/6, A-5020 Salzburg, AUSTRIA/EUROPE

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