Special menu needs of user subgroups (Debian Jr. & Med)
On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 10:58:13PM -0700, Joseph Carter wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 08:22:23PM -0500, Chris Lawrence wrote:
> > Someone said:
> > > I've got one other suggestion for addition to the format, really. More
> > > useful than a hint about where to put a menu entry is whether or not you
> > > should show it at all, based on the sort of user you're dealing with. A
> > > user who is very technically astute would probably find it useful having
> > > the Gnome calculator sitting there in the menu right next to entries which
> > > run bc or dc in a terminal window.. My mom would not, however. This is a
> > > problem with the Debian menus, and even to some extent an upstream Gnome
> > > and KDE problem - both desktops have tools which are not for the unwashed
> > > masses who don't know what they do.
> >
> > Yes, though I'm not sure how this should be handled.
> > Perhaps X-Expertise-Level=(novice|intermediate|advanced)
>
> Yes, something like that would be sufficient. Or perhaps Target-Audience
> which could just as easily be novice, sysadmin, or whatever? I haven't
> really given this the thought it deserves yet. Just figured I'd suggest
> it while it was in my mind that it would be a good thing.
Debian Jr. needs menus tailored for a special user base: children. Andreas
Tille also has a special group of users to cater to with his project,
Debian-Med. He and I are working within the curent menu system with these
ideas:
- each subgroup member should be part of a common Unix group
- menus are one of several things that might be tailored for this group
- in each Jr. or Med meta-package[1], the postinst will run a helper script
to populate ~/.menu/ for all members of the appropriate group
- the Jr. and Med projects have their own top-level directory and the
Jr. and Med projects are free to structure the menus beneath these
top-level directories however we see fit
There are a number of obvious shortcomings to this approach, but we felt
that to get something working today, without grappling with trying to modify
menu policy, we had to take this route. It would be nice if both the menu
system and policy supported the needs of special user subgroups like ours
better.
Ben
1. These two projects are structured by a series of meta packages which
depend on all packages included by the project. A top-level task
for the project installs all project meta packages.
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