Re: [PROPOSED] moving the menu hierarchy into debian policy

[cwitty@newtonlabs.com (Carl R. Witty)]

Laurent Martelli <martelli@iie.cnam.fr> writes:

> >>>>> "Chris" == Chris Waters <xtifr@dsp.net> writes:
>
>   Chris> Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net> writes:
>
>   >> * You need to limit menus to no more than 15 items, 10 is
>   >> better. Otherwise they won't fit on some screens.
>
>   Chris> This is a whole 'nuther ball of wax.  Joost mentioned this
>   Chris> when I discussed menus with him.  The problem is that you
>   Chris> cannot predict which packages will be installed, so you need
>   Chris> to write some sort of intelligent heuristics.  If you just
>   Chris> create a wider, deeper set of categories, you're going to end
>   Chris> up with all sorts of nearly-empty menus on a lot of peoples
>   Chris> systems (most?).  Which is Not Good.  There is a *lot* of
>   Chris> work involved in trying to achieve this one.  Therefore, I
>   Chris> suggest we ignore this issue until we come up with a Good
>   Chris> scheme.
>
> I think it'd be better to fix window managers so that they can cope
> with long menus, à la WindowMaker for instance. A decent window
> manager should be able to do this.

Yes, window managers should cope with long menus.  However, a) some of
them won't (I believe Debian ships several window managers with
essentially no upstream development); and b) very long menus are
annoying from a UI standpoint.  So I think keeping the menu length
down is still a worthwhile goal.

Carl Witty
cwitty@newtonlabs.com