Josselin Mouette wrote:
> We can use additional keywords in the desktop entries to get them sorted
> in sub-menus when appropriate, but many desktop files are not tagged
> correctly. As you can see in the specification [0], all categories we
> need should be here, so if we tag desktop files appropriately, the
> generated menu should be usable.
Oddly, the specification nearly exactly mirrors the despised
Debian menu system, as far as the categorisation of games goes:
FDo menu Debian menu
ActionGame Games/Action
AdventureGame Games/Adventure
ArcadeGame Games/Arcade [1]
BoardGame Games/Board
BlocksGame Games/Blocks (was Games/Tetris-like until recently)
CardGame Games/Card
KidsGame
LogicGame Games/Puzzles
RolePlaying
Simulation Games/Simulation
SportsGame
StrategyGame Games/Strategy
So if we're missing a lot of .desktop files for games, why not have menu
generate .desktop files for all games that put them in the Gnome/KDE
menus, outside of the Debian menu? How is adding desktop files to all
the games that have menu files a good use of our time, when we can get
to the same result with a simple code change?
I also notice that it offers a ConsoleOnly category (tag), that kinda
invalidates your earlier point about the Debian menus having too many
console apps in them. menu could simply put needs=text apps in the
ConsoleOnly category when generating .desktop files and they should be
hidden away in submenus.
> > > 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.
> > Which few exactly?
>
> Depends on what I'm playing at the moment. Currently that would be
> neverball and noiz2sa.
The best way to get menu dropped from the desktop tasks would be to show
that there's enough coverage in .desktop files that users won't be
installing many things and failing to find them in the menu.
That's a difficult analysis to make, IMHO. It could start by looking at
the lintian lab on gluck, and the Contents file, to come up with some
numbers for coverage in the whole of Debian:
FDo menu [2] Debian menu
total items 1525 3755
games 212 659
text mode 0 [3] 461
So, .desktop coverage of games is indeed not good. But neither is
general coverage. There are 1322 Debian menu items that are not for
text-mode programs, and not for games, and that don't seem to have a
corresponding .desktop file.
You've pointed out a few specific cases, like yelp, and some small
categories, like shells, window managers, and programming languages,
that shouldn't need desktop files. But these can't amount to more than
a few hundred menu items, surely.
It seems that you're still a ways off from your goal. IMHO the best way
to reach it would be to convince people that it's worth doing (I'm still
not convinced that it wouldn't be less work to improve the .desktop
files that menu generates), and then handle it as a transition, or
release goal, or something, rather than just filing bugs on individual
games as you fail to find them in the gnome menu.
--
see shy jo
[1] Recently retired in favour of Games/Action. Having both "action" and
"arcade" will probably lead to semi-random splits of games between the
two very similar categories, or games being put in both categories.
[2] Limited to ones in /usr/share/applications since all the other seem
to be for internal use by packages like app-install-data, or for
things generally not directly comprable to stuff the Debian menu is
used for.
[3] I didn't grep all the .desktop files to check, but I assume nearly
none are for text mode stuff, right?
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