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Re: [desktop] why kde and gnome's menu situation sucks



Colin Walters wrote:
> What I think we will do eventually is add a single "novice" or "expert"
> prompt to debian-installer, towards the end.

It should really be at the beginning, the debconf levels can effect the
questions d-i asks too.

> It will likely affect a large number of things: the default debconf
> priority and the menu layout being the two major things I can think of
> off the top of my head.  For novices, the default GNOME and KDE menus
> would be carefully constructed to present only those applications which
> would be best suited for novices.  We'll let the people on the separate
> GNOME and KDE teams decide what those are.  Experts will get the
> full-blown Debian menu, with all ten million X terminal emulators, fifty
> thousand text editors, etc.

I wonder if we really need to worry about limiting menus. If a desktop
debian installation only installs one terminal emulator, and if the new
menu can do menu collapsing/rearranging, then a naive installation will
just have one terminal emulator, on a top-level menu. If the user, moving
out of complete newbie-hood, descides to install another terminal emulator,
they would then get a submenu with both in it.

This might fail if some package that is part of the desktop task pulls
in a bunch of terminal emulators, but surely we can fix the dependencies
in that case. It also fails slightly if the system's admin has a
different clue level than the system's user and decides to install a
veriety of xterms, but that could be considered their problem; the
system has a clued admin who can resolve it on their own in that case.
If the desktop project is just targeting single-user desktop machines,
this should not be an issue. I guess it fails if gnome installs one
terminal emulator and kde another, and if both are installed by the
desktop install.

-- 
see shy jo

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