Re: debian menu's
This is both about long menutitles, and about multiple languages.
>
> > Could it be possible to provide both a short and a long description ?
>
> Joost suggested the same thing, I didn't really like the suggestion
> because the way he wanted to add this new field was somewhat hackish. I
> suppose if we can come up with a clean place to put the new field, it'd be
> all right to go this way, and your suggestion will give us an easy
> transition.
>
> Maybe the new field order could be:
>
> text Math gnuplot none "Gnuplot" "An Interactive Plotting Program" gnuplot
Well, the reason I came up with my proposal of:
text Math gnuplot --longtitle "An Interactive Plotting Program" none "Gnuplot" gnuplot
Is that really, I would prefer some possibility to expand even more
(specifying sounds to play when the entry is selected, a helpfile, whatever)
By allowing the original "menuentryid" place to contain some "--*" option,
we can add as many entries as we like. And, idealy, I'd like to go
to something like
gnuplot --type text --section Math --title "Gnuplot" \
--longtitle "Interactive Plotting Program" \
--command /usr/bin/gnuplot
(I left out the --icon, as it doesn't specify one).
The /etc/menu-methods can be changed to only accept this style, and
update-menus can be changed to automatically convert old-style menufiles
to new ones (not the files themselves, but whatever the menu-methods
get handed to them).
But, I also see that we probably don't want to extend the menuentries
too much (sounds is a silly examples, and I'm not sure on how realistic
helpfiles ever will be), so I'm not sure it's needed at all.
The remark of Larz about different languages is certainly true. The only
problem I see his sugestion (putting menufiles in for example
/usr/lib/menu/$LANG/, in each package) it is that we can probably
not expect the american package maintainer to know the Finnish for
"Gnuplot". Maybe it 'd be better if we have one file for each language
that contains things like (for /usr/lib/menu/LANG/Dutch [1]):
gnuplot Gnuteken
xpaint Xschilder
xlock/random Willekeurig
i.e. for each menuentryid a translation into the local language.
I think this would be easier to maintain/create for someone
who speaks english+other language, than when s/he needs to mail
100 maintainers, informing them about the translations.
These files would then probably be put in the menu package, or
some local package that also provides the local man pages?
I can easily provide a /usr/lib/menu/lang/skeleton file that
contains all menuentryid's from unstable, with the english titles,
for translators to get inspiration.
All of the above are suggestions only!
--
joost witteveen
joost@rulcmc.leidenuniv.nl
joostje@debian.org
--
Use Debian/GNU Linux!
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