On Sat, Apr 10, 2004 at 08:26:00AM +0200, Christian Perrier wrote: > Shouldn't this be reported as a wishlist bug against the menu package? No, it needs discussion first. I'm not a kde user, but I think their menus have changed in the past from an integrated one to having the debian menu separate - A simple patch like this is unlikely to prove a long lasting solution. A typical desktop Debian installation has lots of applications installed. These include apps based on kde, gnome, motif and others. They are installed on the system, so the user is likely to want to use them all at some point. At the moment, most menus have the main section generated by .desktop files and then the Debian section in some hard to reach submenu at the end of the menu. This is understandable - the .desktop files offer far superior quality to Debian menu entries (including translations and having support from upstream); and applications targeted towards a distribution should appear more prominently than other random applications. A use case example of current use of the menu: trying to find a graphics application to create a diagram to go in my dissertation. (I'm using gnome. Applies similarly to other desktops) User clicks on gnome applications menu Graphics menu looks promising (even has a nice icon), so clicks on it. There are a lot of items in the menu. No further sub-categorisation means that it includes icon editors, photo collection programs, basic drawing programs and technical drawing programs all in one long list. This takes a long time to go through - hover over each item, read descriptions in tooltips, try a few apps and find they're not suitable. Then the newbie user probably thinks that they don't have any suitable app installed. A friend points them to the debian menu. Goes to applications->debian->Apps (I have menu hinting optimisation switched on) Sees a few apps, many without icons, none with tooltips. Thinks that Gnome menu is good, but Debian developers don't care about their menu and don't do a good job. Thinks about how nice their menu at work is (which was custom designed for a smaller set of applications). Doesn't know what most of the apps are. Menu reasonably short, so not too much effort to look through. Sees Graphics submenu. Looks promising so clicks on it. Again, a short menu. Clicks on Vector submenu and finds a few applications. Has to try them all since they don't have descriptions, but finds suitable application (xfig, of course). Now, what in an ideal world should happen (IMHO): User clicks whatever looks more likely to contain what they want: application->Graphics->Vector. Sees all apps, with icons and tooltips in their local language. Applications for that desktop are at the top of the menu. Other applications are either at the end of the menu below a separator if the menu is short, or in a submenu if the menu is already quite long. All menus are of reasonable length. How to make this happen: - Menu package has to interpret both .desktop files and current Debian menu files. Trying to use only our own menu files is hopeless - upstream developers are the only people who can do a good job of this. Their translators translate the application and also the menu files. Also, why should we write menu entries when upstream have already done this. We can't even share our changes with upstream since nobody else uses them. - Indicate which desktop each application is targeted to. Either by the use of a hint in the Debian menu file (e.g. GNOME), or by the location in which the .desktop file was found. - Turn on hint optimisation by default - Generate all menus entirely with the menu package. Menus with hints for that desktop will always go at the top of the menu. Other items will go either at the end of the menu or in a (non-gnome/other/?) submenu. - Document standard hints to use in debian menu entries. Make it easy for people to add new ones to this document. Have these in the menu package with translations. - possibly: Remove the section entry from the Debian menu files. Use only hints. This may make it easier to merge the debian menu into the current upstream menu categories. - File lots of bugs against packages which have bad menu entries. Bad means menu entries which don't have hints, or use hints which are different to what other apps use. For example, my editors menu has two submenus, one called "Word processors" and another "WordProcessors". They should be the same. There are also lots of items in the editors menu that don't have hints, so that menu is unnecessarily long. Developers can choose to use either Debian menu format or .desktop format. Looking through my debian menu, almost all graphical applications would need bugs filing. The last point is the most important and probably the one which has led to the Debian menu being so underused at the moment. If you decide to make these changes, the menus will be in a terrible condition until many packages get their menu entries into shape. There's nothing we can do about that other than filing bugs and waiting. -- .''`. Mark Howard : :' : `. `' http://www.tildemh.com `- mh@debian.org | mh@tildemh.com | mh344@cam.ac.uk
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