On Sat, Mar 15, 2003 at 09:28:54PM -0800, Osamu Aoki wrote: > > > I'm interested in helping in the menu issue, too; I've offered help some > > > months ago, but I didn't get many answers. There are some different > > > problems there though, like coping with the existing Gnome and KDE menus. > I guess package selection under > desktop :: gnome :: ??? should somehow correspond to Gnome menu. > desktop :: kde2 :: ??? should somehow correspond to KDE menu. What is the goal of having a gnome/ and a kde/ hierarchy inside the menu? I consider the purpose of the menu system to be to find the choice of applications available for a given task and run the one we want. In that context, i find it mostly useless to be presented with the question: "do you wish to do something kde-ish, gnome-ish or whatever-ish?". In practice, I've seen users getting quite confused when opening the Gnome Foot menu and finding application scattered through three different arbitrary hierarchies. If the purpose is really to help users to find the choice of applications available for a given task and run the one they want, we should focus towards a unique, task-oriented hierarchy. There is also a specific purpose for the Gnome menu: help desks want to have a well-known ground in which move to help users. If the menus have an uncontrolled organization, they will have great difficulties in even telling users how to start a given application. I'm convinced this is not a problem we should solve alone, and we need to cooperate with the people from Gnome and KDE. I've heard voices they were working in a unified menu organization: if this is true, since we also have a menu system we should definitely get in the discussion. > How can we extract data? I'm sorry, I did not understand this question. > > Anyway, I was thinking if we could perhaps come up with a unified > > section hierachy for both package browsing and menus. Both have to be > > redone IMHO and this would simplify things a lot. > This is very true. This is tempting, but the package selection menus are focused in browsing available system features (packages), while launcher menus are focused in browsing available user applications. The task is different, so we should pay attention at the risk of using a solution which is unique, but suboptimal for both. Bye, Enrico -- GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>
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