Re: Brief descriptions in menu entries

[Ben Burton <bab@debian.org>]

Just a note regarding the submenu idea:

> Yes, and that makes it even worse.  If it's worth doing, it's worth 
> doing right-- create another level of menu:
> 
> Applications -> Internet -> Web Browsers -> Mozilla
>                                              Galeon
>                                              etc.
> 
> If that's a bad idea (because there's too few entries to be useful) 
> then so is your proposal, for the same reason.

The primary purpose of genericname is not to sort apps by functionality.
It's to tell users what app_with_strange_name is used for.

KDE for instance provides genericnames with all of its native KDE apps,
and in most cases every genericname is different.

So yes, the submenu example is bad because the menus have few entries to
be useful.  But genericnames are not bad for the same reason, because
there's no drawback to having apps with unique genericnames - after all,
genericnames are not intended primarily as a sorting tool.

Ben. :)