Re: Re: Debian packages and freedesktop.org (Gnome, KDE, etc) menu entries
On Thu, Dec 04, 2003 at 10:04:56PM +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote:
| > Why be gratuitously different?
|
| Why not? Why waste effort just to be the same as everybody else?
|
| It's identical to the old rpm vs. deb argument.
Really? Once again, I believe that there are differences, in that it
should be possible to have .desktop entries and Debian menu entries
coexisting while we standardise on .desktops for newer software which
wants to take advantage of them. However, I think that for this to
happen, it would be nice to see somewhat better integration of the
current menu system into KDE and Gnome, i.e. not just squirrelled away
in "Debian" submenus.
Having .rpms and .debs coexisting during some transitional period is, on
the other hand, not a viable option.
| > There's now a standard used by KDE and GNOME which has more features than the
| > Debian menu system.
| >
| > Which makes more sense:
| >
| > * Investing time in adding features to the Debian menu system, keeping maximum
| > menu work on the Debian maintainers, retaining poor GNOME and KDE
| > integration, and generally competing with the freedesktop standard
| >
| > * Adopting the freedesktop standard and absorbing its benefits for GNOME and
| > KDE users immediately, while benefiting from upstream work
|
| This is the fallacy of the false dilemma.
Hmm. I don't think it's quite a false dilemma - the original post
didn't claim that those two were the only options - however it is most
definitely a case of special pleading :-)
| > Frankly, I'm not clear why there's opposition to adopting the freedesktop
| > draft specifications in Debian.
| >
| > Are there any technical complaints about it? (Apart from "I don't like
| > the .desktop extension", which I consider unimportant.)
|
| It doesn't support anything but gnome or kde. We have a system that
| works for everything, and it is unlikely that anybody else will go to
| that much trouble.
It doesn't /yet/ support anything but Gnome and KDE. You've been
proposing hacking additional features supported by the freedesktop
system into the Debian system; Nate has already said that he might write
a converter to generate menu files from .desktop files to retain
compatibility for everything else, in which case the .desktop system
will support everything that the current menu system does. That doesn't
sound so bad, does it?
| > Perhaps a "backward-compatability-menu" module could be written to
| > automagically generate Debian menu entries from .desktop entries. If this
| > would satisfy everyone's complaints, I'll write the damn thing.
|
| That's half of what is needed (to support gnome and kde within the
| debian menu system). The other half is the reverse conversion - take
| the upstream .desktop file, and convert it to a debian manu
| entry. That supports everything other than gnome and kde. It should be
| pretty easy - they're simple text files.
I fail to see what the difference is between the quoted text and your
'pretty easy' suggestion... perhaps you meant to say "take the Debian
menu entry and generate a .desktop"? That, also, should be simple,
because it's already bleedin' done.
In fact, it looks like it's been implemented twice, once for KDE and
once for GNOME. (Is there any reason why the .desktop files aren't being
shared between the two DE's? It also appears to me that KDE is doing a
marginally better job of integrating the Debian menu into the KDE menu.)
Cheers,
Cameron.
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