Re: Generating the Debian menu from .desktop files?
* Charles Plessy <charles-debian-nospam@plessy.org> [070118 14:28]:
> However, I also agree that it is boring and error-generating to maintain
> menu entries in two separate files in separate formats. The .desktop
> format has one great advantage: it supports internationalisation.
Which the Debian menu support since before freedesktop even started to
exist. (It was a bit limited as it was written in the thought to
generate seperate menus for each language and only later get the support
to put them all in one file easily as it is needed to generate .desktop
file, but that is quite old stuff, too).
Same by the way with not showing some entries in some programs. On
the one hand it allows to add new types for stuff only applicable to
special menus (like fvwm-modules only to be shown in fvwm and so on).
And also supports to mark some entries to not show up in some programs.
KDE for example used this to not show entries in the Debian menu that
already were in their special menu. Don't know what they currently do.
I personally do install neither Gnome nor KDE nowadays and let users
only choose between the working solutions. Gnome and KDE got so broken
by design and "not-invented-here, there must be an inferior solution we
can choose" that it just got too much hassle support it.
And just to repeat myself over the years: Please do not abuse the
term userfriendlyness to solicit solutions only fitting to some
hypothetical users. If you do not want people confused about different
programs for the same task, don't install the other programs. And if
there are different programs needed by different users, make all of them
visible. The only thing confusing people more than too many programs for
a task in my experience are different menus in different environment so
one pal/colleaque suggesting the one sm/wm and another pal/colleaque
showing them some program in their wm and they cannot find it in their
account, though it is the same computer...
Hochachtungsvoll,
Bernhard R. Link
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