Josselin Mouette wrote: > The Freedesktop.org menu is not meant to be limited to GNOME and KDE > components. But how well does it scale, if you put a random sampling of about 700 menu items (about the quantity in my laptop's Debian menu) in it? Does it become a total disaster and mess in which I can't find $IMPORTANT_GOME_APP when I'm using Gnome, or is this somehow dealt with? > IMO the Debian menu should be entirely deprecated unless something > serious is done about it. Well, I'm not particularly arguing against that. I am, however, asking that if we decide to do it, we _decide_ and then _do_it_. Currently, without rationalle, lots of maintainers are being asked to add redundant info to their packages in the form of .desktop files. As such a maintainer, I have a hard time telling if doing so is the right thing for me to be doing right now, or if it will just add work and clutter up Gnome's menu with my insignificant games and esoteric GUI apps. Just filing a bunch of bugs with patches will tend to have scattershot results, and will not get any scaling/organisation/design issues with using the FDo menus anticipated and dealt with ahead of time. > * Most importantly, it is absolutely full of useless stuff. This seems to argue that if we throw out menu and add .desktop files, we will only want to add them for some things. Which things, and how do we decide what? Without some clear direction as to what's appropriate to add, the way I see it heading is that we'll get .desktop files for maybe 50% of the same useless stuff. > Why do we need a menu entry for each shell ? A user who wants another > shell is most probably capable of running it himself. Granted. > A menu entry for each window manager? WTF? We can select them from the > display manager now. Some of us like to change WMs without closing our 50 xterms. This is a very nice feature of the current system, actually. > A menu entry for yelp? It is already accessible from all applications > needing it and from the GNOME panel. Granted. So, why does yelp have a desktop file too, then? > An entry for each python/TCL/guile interpreter on the system? Can't > developers use terminals? Granted. > An entry for each of the bsdgames? > For nano? For so many terminal applications that you want to run, well, > in a terminal? Some of us like to set up dumb terminals from which users can select the bsdgames and other terminal apps from a menu such as pdmenu. As a typically overdesigned Debian sytem, the menu system caters to that. :-) Note that it also allows _excluding_ all such text-based menu items from a menu, so if we don't want them in Gnome, we could remove them from its menus. > Apart from a few games (see the initial request you were faced with), Which few exactly? > I can't find anything in the Debian menu which is neither already in the > GNOME menu at a better place, or simply completely unsuitable for a > graphical menu. If that's actually true, we could drop menu from the gnome-desktop and kde-destkop tasks. (What about XFCE?) -- see shy jo
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