Menu hierarchie for different users and general user settings

[Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de>]

Hello,

a recent discussion on debian-jr list brought up the idea that it
could be sane if we would have menus targeting to users of
different skills.  A normal user doesn't need to see all the stuff
an advanced user might want to see and regarding to the topic
of debian-jr a child might be confused by the lot of menu items
and could perhaps miss the "games" entry which might be the only
interesting one for this kind of user.  So I wonder if there could
be installed a mechanism in the menu system which serves the
following functionality:

   1. list menuitems of all installed software (the state we have now)
      for the experienced user
   2. list e reasonable set of software in the menu system for the
      normal user
   3. list a restricted set of applications (say "Games", netscape and
      may be some educational stuff) which might be configured for
      the users with certain interests.

While writing this I remember a discussion at the Debian Conference in 
Bordeaux when we wondered how to set i18n settings for the unexperienced
user (for those who doesn't know which variables to set in the personal
profiles).  In my opinion language information has to be connected to
the user information when creating a new user.  This is done in
/etc/passwd, but well it has a well defined structure and might be
not the right place.  Someone suggested to use a LDAP database by default
for login process and there would be a good place to store language
information in my opinion.  I'm really not experienced with those
topics and would like to pull in this as suggestion.  I noticed that
adduser is rewritten and may be this idea could bring in some thoughts.

Back to the subject:  The LDAP database could also contain the applications
a user is interested in and may be also the menu system could search the
database before a window manager is fired up for a certain user ...
ideas for Debian 4.0 or something else ;-).

Moreover I wonder how we could do internationalisation of menu items.
This seems me fairly hard, because currently the menuitems are connected
to the Debian package and we couldn't ask the maintainer to manage
42 different languages for the menu entries.  In most cases the
entry of a package will be for all languages the same (well, the name
of the program is just the name), but it would make a difference if
it would go in the section "Games" or the German "Spiele".

Any idea about that.  Should I file a bug report (wishlist) to menu
or is it a more general topic?

Kind regards

           Andreas.