Re: [desktop] why kde and gnome's menu situation sucks
On 10/23/2002 2:09 PM, Joey Hess at joeyh@debian.org wrote:
> 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.
>
For the sake of simplicity, someway to limit menu choices is needed. It
ain't easy, but has to be done if Debian Desktop is to be worth the effort.
Not to quibble too much on details at this early stage, but I don't see a
high level menu entry for "Terminal Emulator". Newbies kinda don't want to
see or know what that is. I see Terminal put under a submenu, perhaps under
something like System Tools which is where Red Hat put it for their 8.0
release.
> 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.
>
Oh, KDE and Gnome do install their own terminal emulators, and Desktop
Debian might very well install a different one in the menu. konsole and
gnome-terminal would still be installed on the system, admittedly wasting a
bit of space, but they would not necessarily show up in the menu. That is
where Debian Desktop's default choice would appear.
Cheers,
Luke Seubert
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