Re: Debian packages and freedesktop.org (Gnome, KDE, etc) menu entries

[Cameron Patrick <cameron@patrick.wattle.id.au>]

On Sat, Dec 06, 2003 at 10:05:57AM +0100, Mathieu Roy wrote:

| Sure. However, I use WindowMaker since several years now, and apart
| from bug fixes, I did not notice real changes over years (the
| changelog does not speak otherwise, it's almost only about bugs and
| i18n updates).
| 
| About blackbox, <http://blackboxwm.sourceforge.net/>, there no news
| since September the 2nd... 2002. 
| 
| It's maybe a mistake to say that these projects are no longer active
| at all, however their activity by comparison to GNOME and KDE is
| pretty small.

What's your point?  The window managers don't /need/ to be changed - or
at least they shouldn't.  They don't natively support Debian's menu
system, they don't natively support .desktop files, and are unlikely to
ever do either.  The current Debian menu system, despite its faults,
supports writing menus for weird formats that an arbitrary window
manager (or other menuing system) might be able to read.  If .desktops
are ever to achieve prominence in Debian, we need to be able to do the
same with those.

(Personally, I feel that extending the current menu system such that it
is both backwards-compatible with what we have not and supports
everything in the freedesktop.org standard is not as trivial as Andrew
has suggested it is in another thread - but if it was accomplished, we
wouldn't have to worry about window managers not supporting .desktop
files as their configuration would be generated just as they are now
using existing menu-methods.)

| For instance, if I correctly understood the story, RedHat stopped
| shipping WindowMaker because they do not want to support a window
| manager that do not follow the agreements between KDE and GNOME
| people, freedesktop.org in fact.

There is no reason for Debian to do something merely because Red Hat
does.  Trying to make Debian compliant with freedesktop's standards by
dropping everything that doesn't support them is a sub-optimal approach,
and is unlikely to be taken seriously by many people.

Cameron.