Re: adding desktop files to misc packages

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> wrote:

> Le mercredi 25 juillet 2007 à 19:35 +0200, Frank Küster a écrit :
>> >> Menus, by their nature, are inherently unusable for the most frequently
>> >> used apps, and we should not be trying to make them more usable at the
>> >> expense of making less frequently used apps harder to access.
>> >
>> > Why shouldn't we attempt to make menus usable?
>> 
>> Because, as Marvin wrote in the text you cite, the drawback is that it
>> makes less frequently used applications harder to access.
>
> If an application is used so infrequently, it shouldn't have its place
> in a menu. 

It seems we have a very different notion of what a menu is.  To me, the
reply "Exactly because it is used infrequently it should have its place"
is obvious and follows strictly from my understanding of a menu, I don't
even need an argument for that.  To you, it seems to be the contrary.

> Furthermore, in the case a user needs it more often, he can
> add it to the menu. This becomes even easier if the menu entry is only
> hidden, not absent.

But it seems to be harder than adding it to the toolbar/dock/whatever.

>> But I agree with Marvin (and that's also my usage scheme) that menus
>> should provide access to the less frequently used applications, not the
>> ones started very often.  I don't have toolbars in my WM, but it starts
>> the frequently used apps without asking me, so I use the menu for the
>> rare ones.
>
> This is also my usage scheme: everyday apps in the session, less
> frequently used apps in the menu, rarely used apps in a terminal or a
> launching tool.

I don't make this distinction between "less used" and "rarely used", and
I'm not even sure what a launching tool is.  I nearly never start a
graphical application from the terminal, and I don't need to be able to
start terminal applications from the menu: For me that is the
only reason for deciding whether something should have a (possibly
hidden) menu entry.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)