Re: Debian menu system update
On Sun, 2003-06-01 at 15:58, Bill Allombert wrote:
> I have already answered about i18n.
If you're referring to extracting the i18n information from .desktop
files; ok, that's a first step. But then we have an ugly situation
where if someone wants to fix a Debian menu entry, they have to know
that for i18n, they edit the .desktop file, and for everything else,
they edit the Debian menu file. We should again be processing .desktop
natively.
> I am not sure about the maintenance
> burden on Debian developers.
Besides just Debian developers, again, I think system administrators are
going to (and should) be expecting to be able to edit their menus using
the freedesktop.org standard.
We can also send menu entries we create upstream, where they belong. We
automatically benefit from other operating system's menu entries.
> Is there stand-alone implementation of this standard ?
Inherently, the freedesktop menu system just defines the layout; so
"implementing" it in a void doesn't make a lot of sense. I suppose the
menu merging algorithms could be shared between implementations, but I
can't see it as being too difficult to do.
The true implementation is where you present the menu tree to the user.
For Debian, that "presentation" is translating the menu to support
legacy software like fvwm.
Note the cool part of this is that after we do this work (for e.g.
fvwm), we can send it upstream! That might be a first step towards
getting them to support the freedesktop standard, and leaving us with
less work to do.
> I have read it, and I have still difficulty to understand its
> full implication.
The implication is basically that we use it as the format of our menu
database (instead of /usr/lib/menu), and convert the menu-methods to
taking that information and translating it to legacy formats such as the
fvwm menu system.
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