Re: Debian Menu policy leads to confusion
On Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 06:32:59PM +0200, Linas Zvirblis wrote:
> Bill Allombert wrote:
>
> >The main issue I have is that I did not make progress in implementing
> >the handling of third level sections in menu.
>
> What is missing? There already are third level entries like "Apps >
> System > Admin". Or am I confusing something?
You are correct in that menu handle third level sections fine.
What is missing is the support for automatically flattening the
third level sections if they are nearly empty.
> >We should avoid renaming sections if we can, this will cause more
> >problems than it is worth.
>
> I was thinking about also renaming top level section. That is, have both
> "Apps" and "Applications" at the same time until all entries migrate.
> Packages maintainers could be asked to ship two menu files. We could
> also have modified menu methods that would ignore entries in new menu,
> and modify them in the same manner to ignore the old menu once the
> transition finishes. Of course, I tested none of this, just an idea.
We could just use the translate_menus mechanism to automatically
replace Apps by Applications. Just add the following lines to the file
/etc/menu-methods/translate_menus
subtranslate section->section
Apps/ Applications/
endtranslate
and menu will apply the changes to all menu entries at once.
> By renaming existing sections I wanted to make menu easier to navigate.
> Besides, long forms ("Mathematical" instead of "Math" for example) are
> also easier to translate and translations will have to be redone anyway.
>
> >Do you have an estimate of the number of menu entry to change ?
>
> Depends on the way the transition will be done, but pretty much all of
> them. If it really has to be backward compatible, I will try to make it
> so. I simply do not think that this is worth it, because transition of
> entries will cause a lot of confusion anyway.
Well, we can reuse the translate_menus mechanism to make the migration
painless. Could you write a /etc/menu-methods/translate_menus file
that implement the change ?
However I am not going to rename the menus without a lot of support from
the project, of course.
Maybe we can split your proposal in two parts
1) adding new sections
2) renaming of old sections
and submit them as separate issues.
Cheers,
Bill.
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