Re: [desktop] Please read the vFolder spec [Was: why kde and gnome's menu situation sucks]
Chris Lawrence <lawrencc@debian.org> writes:
> - The new menu package will include a facility (like the existing menu
> package does) to build menu hierarchies. The new menu package is
> aware of Debian extensions (X-Debian-TryPackage; Group) and allows
> expressing categorization (mapping Categories and Group keywords to
> a hierarchical menu) more flexibly than the XML vFolder format.
> This facility can be used by any window manager, desktop manager
> (existing menu entries are used to declare the list of available
> session managers; this will need to be supported), help manager (our
> menu entries are used by dwww too), or anything else that wants to
> show a menu of installed programs and help files (a launcher applet,
> an application's "Debian Menu", whatever).
>
Not sure you are doing this, but it causes problems to use a different
format as the primary distribution format, and as the native format
for the desktops. Among those problems are that menu editing gets
more confusing (or breaks), and that you have to write more
Debian<->desktop glue, more Debian-specific docs, and maintain all of
it.
The vfolder spec is NOT nailed down. In fact a proposal for a fairly
large revision was posted yesterday or the day before to xdg-list, by
one of the WINE guys. And KDE is still largely silent on what they
think we should do in this area.
I believe whatever gets agreed on for GNOME/KDE common format is
likely to be proposed for LSB. (And I have to say, if there is a
GNOME/KDE common format, using some different setup for Debian seems
kind of dubious.)
So short version of my comment, if vfolder doesn't work for you, you
need to be posting to xdg-list and keeping the menu discussion there
moving forward, not cooking up Yet Another Menu System In Isolation.
If we can get GNOME, KDE, Red Hat, Debian all using the same system
out-of-the-box that'll be a solid de facto standard and clean up this
mess once and for all.
To help out with implementation: see my desktop-file-utils package
(http://www.freedesktop.org/software/) for desktop-menu-tool, which
can currently generate an old-style tree of desktop files from
vfolders. If people want to make it generate other kinds of things
from vfolders, I'd take the patches. And as we change the vfolder spec
or decide on a different menu spec, I plan to keep desktop-menu-tool
in sync.
So a good way to say implement "standard menu system to WindowMaker"
or whatever would be to add a desktop-menu-tool output mode.
Havoc
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