Re: Debian support for XDG_MENU_PREFIX under GNOME
Le jeudi 11 janvier 2007 à 16:10 +0100, Vincent Untz a écrit :
> Replying to old mail...
>
> Le lundi 04 décembre 2006, à 23:07, Josselin Mouette a écrit :
> > I've committed all relevant changes (-menus, -panel, bug-buddy, eel2) to
> > our SVN.
>
> Did you forward the patch upstream, or is it not useful for upstream? (I
> know you usually do so, but I prefer to check :-))
The situation around this transition is far from perfect. The patch may
be useful for you GNOME folks, but probably not as is.
First, most distributions will probably want to retain the single menu
structure, as they like to have the same menu for different desktop
environments. Debian has chosen the opposite path: we provide a
different user experience with each desktop environment, and that
includes the menus.
Second, half of the patch is missing: we rename files in the packaging
scripts, and the patch only takes care of handling that renaming when
the menus are requested.
Third, the patch itself is a bit hackish. If the applications-merged
directory wasn't here, we could only prepend the files by "gnome-" and
get done with it. Instead, it has to add "gnome-" for the menus files
known to be renamed, and strip it when looking at the merged directory.
This is the less intrusive way of doing things, but I can think of
better approaches.
Fourth, the patch does not implement the XDG specification, and Debian
never will. Following the XDG specification would imply to set the
XDG_MENU_PREFIX environment variable in gnome-session, and to read this
variable in the gnome-menus library. This directly contradicts with our
policy to not rely on environment variables. The maintainer who did the
menu changes to KDE agreed that this is certainly not the way to go.
Fifth, such a change cannot deal with anything not using gnome-menus.
The most problematic application is alacarte, which uses python-xdg.
Currently, we have patched it to prepend "gnome-" to menus it requests,
but this way it can't handle applications-merged. Fixing it requires an
API extension to python-xdg so that alacarte can set a prefix. The
efforts required go far beyond the interest I have in fixing it...
I guess it all depends on whether enough people are interested in menu
renaming. The best option is probably to do this conditionally with a
configure flag, as forcing other distributions to rename them is not
nice. It should probably not be done until the python-xdg/alacarte
situation is improved.
The one thing I ask is that GNOME goes on with not implementing
freedesktop stuff when it is plain wrong. This has been the case until
now so I'm confident.
Cheers,
--
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