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Re: gnome, kde, xfce use non-policy main menu



On Wed, Jul 09, 2008 at 09:05:11AM +0200, cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis) wrote:

>   -> AFAIK there's no fundamental reason why Debian couldn't switch from  
>      menu to .desktop to specify the desktop entries (aside from the
>      necessary coding not having been done to adapt menu to do so)

Debian menu files specify things that .desktop files don't and (in
their current incarnation) can't.  Most notably, the "needs" field.
The .desktop files have a simple boolean flag for "runs in terminal".
That's inadequate for Debian's needs.  For example, Fvwm modules
*must* be invoked by Fvwm.  It would be pointless and stupid to put
them in any menu but Fvwm's.  So, the Fvwm modules need "fvwmmodule",
not "text" or"x11".  That's simply not possible with .desktop files.

Debian menus are generated.  There's no advantage in generating them
from .desktop files, because the format of the output of the generator
is what matters, not the format of the input.  Generating Debian menus
from .desktop files would not change a thing, except that we'd have to
rewrite the generator.  We still need a general purpose menu
generating tool for all the systems which don't use .desktop files,
and we still couldn't just use the raw input .desktop files as output
because we need to filter out things like Fvwm modules.   So
generating menus from .desktop files has no advantages and lots of
disadvantages.

-- 
Chris Waters           |  Pneumonoultra-        osis is too long
xtifr@debian.org       |  microscopicsilico-    to fit into a single
or xtifr@speakeasy.net |  volcaniconi-          standalone haiku


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