Re: Debian menus policy
Sean Middleditch wrote:
...
> Here I have to disagree. From experience with lusers, I've found that
> they rarely understand organization of items in menues. For them,
> redundancy is a good thing. It makes it easier for them to find what
> they're looking for. They might not even think to look for any kind of
> "text editor", be it editors->text or text->editors, but they might
> think to look for office->text. Similarly, tho, if I'm looking for Vi,
> the last place I'd check is a menu called "office."
>
> The more ways to get to soemthing, the easier it is to find.
that would be true for if one particular application would do it.
however if all applications do it then the space you're searching
increases as well and it's not easier to find. Considering the number of
programs on 'normal' system I don't think it's a good idea to have
redundancy, unless necessary (e.g. program has two or more different
functions and all are fairly important, but then menu entry should
reflect that - e.g. Mozilla mail, Mozilla browser, not two menu entries
both called Mozilla).
...
> Well, talking about that, look back to UNIX roots - small programs that
> do one thing, and do it very well, that can all integrate. For this,
> I'd recommend allowing the full menu meta information to be accessed in
> a nice way; then, allow the program that actually generates the menus to
> be easily swapped out or overridden. For example, one user might use
> menus-full, another might use menus-functional, and another might have a
> custom script.
definitely, one might even create temporary query based menus! that's
why the menu inforamtion should be related to the keywords that
categorize programs (it's afterr all basically the same thing). let the
fun begin...
erik
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