New Menu hierarchy (was Re: [PROPOSED] moving the menu hierarchy into debian policy)
Quoting Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>:
> [ Note that I think all this discussion is a little premature - I'd still
> like to get the current proposal into policy first. ]
I agree with you, so I move it to debian-devel and change the subject line.
Still need to CC you, joost?
>
> Chris Waters wrote:
> > This is why *my* number one, absolute top priority for changes to the
> > current menu system is to put in a TOP LEVEL ENTRY NAMED "Help". With
> > at least: "Debian Online Help" (currently hidden in Apps/Tools), Gnome
> > Help (currently in Apps/Viewers), tkinfo (currently in Apps/Viewers),
> > and xman (location unknown). This is SOO important for novices!
>
> I completly agree.
<AOL/me too/
>
> > > * You need to limit menus to no more than 15 items, 10 is better.
> Otherwise
> > > they won't fit on some screens.
> >
> > This is a whole 'nuther ball of wax. Joost mentioned this when I
> > discussed menus with him. The problem is that you cannot predict
> > which packages will be installed, so you need to write some sort of
> > intelligent heuristics. If you just create a wider, deeper set of
> > categories, you're going to end up with all sorts of nearly-empty
> > menus on a lot of peoples systems (most?). Which is Not Good. There
> > is a *lot* of work involved in trying to achieve this one. Therefore,
> > I suggest we ignore this issue until we come up with a Good scheme.
>
> Right. One easy way to handle this that I rememer talking about with Joost
> was making menu detect menus with only 1 or 2 items in them, and collapsing
> such menus into the parent menu. That would be nice to have. Until menu
> supports that though, we just need to keep an eye on large menus like
> Apps/Net and be prepared to split them when they are too big on most
> systems.
There are the other way around, also, which I think is better (but not
exclusive to your scheme): when menu are too big (can be determined with a
variable), just divided the pacakges by [ number_of_packages %
limit_of_packages + 1] and find the nearest first letter change. After that,
you could build sub-menus with title like A-L, M-W and X-Z. I think this
work can be done (not necessarely easily) in the current menu system, without
affecting all the WM. Joost has made an excellent job for this :)
>
> --
> see shy jo
>
>
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Fabien Ninoles Chevalier servant de la Dame Catherine des Rosiers
aka Corbeau aka le Veneur Debian GNU/Linux maintainer
E-mail: fab@tzone.org
WebPage: http://www.tzone.org/~fabien
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