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Re: Hamradio packages in various menus



Hi Both,

> > I thought your proposal would be to fix the .desktop files in the
> > individual application packages (and possibly forwarding changes
> > upstream).
>
> it was Dave, not me,

Yep, that's what I'm suggesting!

> I would add a submenu for each hamradio-* package
> but it would probably increase the mess,
> but this reminded that I looked at this a while ago and wrote a Python
> script to extract information from desktop files, however the output
> is messy (see the attached HTML file which contains columns for
> categories and also for keywords)

Something tickled my  brain here, but I couldn't put my finger on it until I 
sat down and thought the problem through.

Many years ago irl and I put in place the blend categories as a submenu 
structure [1] as an experiment. 
We clearly intended to adopt the package but for whatever reason at the time 
it did not get published and there has since been QA releases of extra-xdg-
menus [2].

As I don't want to publish bugs and patches twice, I'm working on a little 
proof of concept to see how it looks to have subcategories. It turns out, 
rather neat! [3].

Unfortunately, while KDE's menu editor recognises categories, the menu doesn't 
display them. I imagine this is similar for Gnome, and those users account for  
the bulk of our install base (at a guess), so is this all a waste of time?
For users on Raspi and other downstreams, I see a reasonable amount of benefit, 
so it's probably worth persevering.

My current proposal is to add a binary `Recommends:` on `extra-
xdg-menus` and to modify the category of each  package to contain `Category: 
Hamradio; X-Hamradio-<subcategory>` in line with their metapackage category.

The downside of this approach is that it makes it less attractive for upstream 
- no one else is implementing these categories, they're of no benefit to Fedora 
or other non Debian derivative users, and maintaining patches on *every* 
desktop file we ship is a lot more work on us for a neat menu.

Anyway this has all given me a hilarious new bug [4] to fight, so I guess I'd 
better try fixing that!

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/debian-hamradio-team/extra-xdg-menus/-/blob/
master/hamradio/hamradio.menu?ref_type=heads

[2] https://salsa.debian.org/debian/extra-xdg-menus

[3] https://cdn.woof.tech/media_attachments/files/114/078/125/276/241/618/
original/75b302221fcf811a.png

[4] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1099077

--  
  Hibby <hibby@debian.org>
  Debian Developer
  Packet Radioist
  MM0RFN

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