Re: some suggestions towards a Debian .desktop policy [Was: Warm up discussion about desktop files]
* Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> [110420 17:44]:
> Le mercredi 20 avril 2011 à 17:30 +0200, Bernhard R. Link a écrit :
> > But for me having everything in the menu is its most important feature.
>
> It’s not a feature. It is a design mistake.
Speaking about design mistakes: You suggest to use the same field for
"This cannot be called directly" and "This should only be visible
after action of the user". And the same field for "This can only be
called in environment XYZ" and "This should by default only be shown
in environment XYZ".
A proper design would be to make this different fields, perhaps add
something a "DefaultVisibility" multi-values field (like Categories)
with all the values valid for OnlyShownIn plus perhaps something like
"Common" plus some other values plus a way similar to gnome's
menus.blacklist but being a white+blacklist to introduce new global
categories (like one for each debian-blends) with an user[1] being
able to configure somewhere which of those categories to show.
Otherwise menus fall back to the pre-Debian-menu state: Every WM shows
a number of program its maintainer thought being what the majority of
users needing, resulting in many environments that 90% of users
do not use 50% of all shows menus while other programs many users
need are not shown at all. (Like here in a maths department pari-gp
even if only having a terminal interface is much more important to get
shown than all the entertaining programs most people do not use at
work-time).
Bernhard R. Link
[1] ideally also the administrator being able to set global defaults
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