Re: Debian menus policy
Brian Nelson wrote:
> > What does logic have to do with it? The meaning is the same either way.
> > It seems to me like an aesthetic preference.
>
> Duh, for the reason the original poster said that you conveniently
> snipped:
>
> "The main reason I presented the titles in verb form was to emphasize
> function as the basis of classification..."
I'm not one of those people who quotes all of a long letter to add two
lines of comments at the bottom. I quote what I'm replying to. And I'd
already directly replied to Thomas's statement in a reply to his
message, anyway. The question for you was why you considered this to be
a matter of "logic", which you have still failed to answer.
> Furthermore, it's more logical to search through a menu that matches
> your thoughts, like editing->text->...
No, I don't agree. If I'm working with a sound file, doing various
things to it, it's convenient for the programs that might use this file
to be grouped together. It's a _sound_ file, I'm working with _sound_,
so if there's a menu labeled "Sound" below which are editors and players
(possibly in submenus, possibly not), that's the most practical
arrangement. It groups together programs that might be used together,
and which can operate on the same files. They are closely related on
that basis. In contrast, a text editor and a sound editor may both edit
files, but not the same files; they really have next to nothing to do
with each other, so grouping them together in the menu is misleading.
Whether you agree with my preference or not, this is a practical and
aesthetic question, not one of logic. You can't reason from first
principles a "correct" answer, nor are contrary answers "wrong".
Instead, you either go for a majority sense of what people want, or you
build enough flexibility into the system that each person can make it do
more or less what he wants. Which wouldn't be that hard to do; the menu
files would just have to have both datatype-oriented and
function-oriented information (essentially forming a two-dimensional
grid of programs) and then you allow the user to configure the menu to
favor one dimension or the other for his view of it. It's not really any
harder than making a file manager able to sort file listings by name or
by size.
Craig
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