The current code is at http://www.phy.olemiss.edu/~cnlawren/debmenu/ Here's what I have for people to play with so far: parse_menus.py: Parses old-style menu files. If executed from the command line, it will convert everything in /usr/lib/menu to the .desktop format and dump the converted files in /var/tmp/debmenu (you'll need to mkdir this first). If you're particularly suicidal (i.e. you run GNOME2), you can then cp -s /var/tmp/debmenu/*.desktop /usr/share/applications and all your Debian applications will show up in the GNOME2 menus (after enough prodding - you probably will need to log out first). parse_desktop.py: Parses .desktop files, creating a dictionary subclass that has all the metadata from the .desktop file. If you run it from the command line, it will parse the gnome-terminal.desktop file and return a few selected attributes, using the interface for i18n (play with LANG to adjust the language it chooses). This will be the basis for the new update-menus. Moshe Zadka came up with a fairly simple generator interface a few days ago that will probably be used by the menu-method files. Still to be decided: - The exact hierarchy. I have a draft hierarchy that is similar to our current default hierarchy, but with branches under several of the overloaded menus, and new top-level menus for some categories that have become more relevant (notably Office-type software). I'd like to make the hierarchy easily customizable on a per-system or per-user basis. - The substance of the new menu policy. The policy will mainly specify the extensions to the .desktop standard we use and the internationalization policy (my general feeling: the untranslated fields must be in the most widely-used or understood variant of particular English words - "colour" not "color", but "soccer" not "football" for association football - en_US would translate colour, en_GB would translate soccer, en_CA or en_AU would translate neither, since they have their own sports called football and they spell color in a semi-snobbish way; other languages may need similar default policies like pt vs. pt_BR). - Probably 1-2 other things that I promised in a previous post but then promptly forgot about. Chris -- Chris Lawrence <cnlawren@olemiss.edu> - http://www.lordsutch.com/chris/ Instructor and Ph.D. Candidate, Political Science, Univ. of Mississippi 208 Deupree Hall - 662-915-5765
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