Re: Icons and instructions for the FreeDesktop menu.
On Sun January 21 2007 02:24, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 17, 2007 at 09:22:57AM +0100, Loïc Minier wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 17, 2007, Charles Plessy wrote:
> > > am I wrong or one can have foo.png in foo.desktop, and foo.xpm in
> > > foo.menu? If upstream does not provide an xpm icon, the "convert"
> > > command of the imagemagick package can easily create one at build
> > > time.
> >
> > My point is that I shouldn't have to maintain both, or to run
> > convert each time this is necessary.
>
> While it would be good to have infrastructure to support automatic
> down-converting to the Debian menu standard where appropriate, you
> can probably see that converting, say, a 64x64 png to a 32x32 xpm is
> going to give inferior results than if an icon is provided that was
> created for the target resolution; so having menu itself
> automatically import .desktop files at runtime doesn't sound like a
> good idea to me.
If by "runtime" you mean when a user logs in or accesses a menu
hierarchy, that would likely result in annoying performance issues for
slower boxes which would be worse than any potential icon quality
problems. Icon quality is a bit of a red herring anyways, imo; as long
as those 16x16 blobs of colours are distinct from each other they serve
their purpose, and don't most icon using desktops automatically scale
icons if necessary.
I also agree that automatic down-converting would be good, but think
that automatic generation of menus from pieces at package install time
would be better. Iow, build a <prg>.menu.common for every interactive
program and use <prg>.menu.[freedesktop|kde|gnome|some-de] for Desktop
Environment specific bits, then require the menu producers be able to
construct a menu entry from the pieces via infrastructure provided
routines.
Assuming the existing menu infrastructure is working OK and the code is
in reasonably good shape, adding support for
{/usr/share,~,etc}/menu/{freedesktop,gnome,kde,some-de} should be a
straightforward extension of how the standard menus are currently
handled.
- Bruce
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