Re: Menu-2.0, optimized menu tree, hints

[Steve Greenland <stevegr@debian.org>]

On 19-Jun-99, 16:16 (CDT), Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net> wrote: 
> Well the alternative that has been brought up before is to make everything
> use a deeper tree (like Apps/Editors/Big/Emacsen), and have menu
> automatically collapse the tree to Apps/Editors on your system with 2 editors 
> and keep the big tree on mine (that has every editor installed).
> 
> The only differences between doing it this way and the hints way are that:
> 
> 1. The hints way is a lot cooler conceptually. :-)
> 2. The collapsing tree way doesn't allow merging of menus like Apps/Sound
>    and Apps/Viewers into Apps/Multimedia.
> 3. The collapsing tree way means that you always find stuff where you'd
>    expect it, you just may not decend as deep in the hierarch as you
>    expected to.
> 
> #2 is a big drawback but at the same time makes things more consitent too,

I disagree strongly; #2 is a definite plus. It's ok, and even a good
thing, to allow submenus to merge when they only have a few entries.
Allowing items to move to completely different trees is, IMO, a bad
thing.

Consider that things like xdvi and tkman should be under "Apps/Viewers".
It would never occur to me that they could be under "Apps/Multimedia";
If I found them there, I would submit a bug to the package maintainers
(who might well disagree with me, but none-the-less).


Hmmm, a little more thought leads me to the conclusion that things like
xdvi and tkman wouldn't end up under "Apps/Multimedia" (because their
hintlists wouldn't include "multimedia", but instead somewhere over in
the text tree, perhaps. Is that correct?

I still don't think that I like the idea of the menu tree being
re-arranged (except the addition and removal of subtrees) just because I
install a new package. It seems like "collapsible deep trees" would get
most of the benefit and be a lot less confusing than the hints system,
cool as it is.

Steve