Re: Icons and instructions for the FreeDesktop menu.
On Sun January 21 2007 16:29, Charles Plessy wrote:
> Le Sun, Jan 21, 2007 at 06:04:09AM -0700, Bruce Sass a écrit :
> > 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.
>
> As the .desktop format becomes a de facto standard, we are more and
> more in a situation where the .menu files have to be written from a
> .desktop file. In a system where the .desktop files used in Debian
> would be generated from the Debian .menu file, this would lead to a
> double conversion.
Requiring the ability to produce a menu entry from pieces is not the
same as requiring that all entries be produced from pieces.
Conversion is not necessary if the infrastructure allows a DE to ignore
all but the .menu.DE bit for apps saying they have a native menu for
that DE. Simply being able to flag a .menu.DE bit as being "complete"
would probably work, but it may be more flexible if it was possible for
an app to indicate to a DE's menu producer which bits it needs to piece
together.
> If persons are willing to work on improving the Debian menu system, I
> would rather advocate using the .desktop format as a native
> configuration file. This way we could take advantage of existing
> information, and also contribute back our work to the the upstream
> developpers when a menu entry is created from scratch for Debian.
I have no problem with the .desktop format. The freedesktop standard can
not be expected to accommodate non-freedesktop based systems though.
- Bruce
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