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Bug#707851: debian-policy: soften the wording recommending menu files



Hi Charles

Thank you for your questions

On Sunday 12 May 2013 10:08:52 Charles Plessy wrote:
> If we were to recommend FreeDesktop menu entries instead of Debian menu
> entires, and if this recommendation were followed carefully, this would
> increase the number of entries in the Gnome and KDE menus on some sytems
> where the user has installed extra packages.  In particular, some entries
> will be redundant with the default applications, and provide only an XPM
> icon or no icon at all.

Currently Plasma Desktop shows both the Debian menu and the 'real' menu - with 
loads of overlaps between them. All these overlaps comes with one with a 'good 
icon' and nice descriptions and everything. The other comes with a poor xpm 
icon or no icon at all, and not always good descriptions of the program. I 
think that if we stopped using the Debian menu and just used the Desktop Menu 
Spec, it would result in *fewer* items in the menu, and best of all no 
duplicates.

> It looks to me that the scope of the Debian menu system is broader than
> the FreeDesktop system.

It looks to me that the scopes are very similar, and the XDG system is 
supported outside debian in most users systems without any extra effort. And in 
many cases the XDG files are even translated by upstream.


>     http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/DebianMenuUsingDesktopEntries

I think this proposal is entirely orthogonal to what I'm suggesting.

> About the current patch, I think that the mention of "legacy debian
> additions to some legacy window managers" is not informative as it does not
> provide guidance.  For the both menu systems, I would like to have
> explanations about 1) what is the scope of this menu, 2) what is the
> standard syntax for the entries, and 3) how packages should implement this.

I think that for 2) and 3) pointing to the existing specs is the right thing 
to do, not trying to summarize the specs.

I'm not sure what you mean by 1)

> For the FreeDesktop entries, can you summarise the expectations, in
> particular about the scope and whether it is better to have a FreeDestkop
> entry with an awful or missing icon or no entry at all ?  

I'm not sure what you mean by scope.  
If the app is useful to have in the menu, then I have no opinion on bad 
artistry. And luckily the artistry can actualy be overridden by regular icon 
themes if the entries here are named matching the XDG icon spec, which I think 
the desktop file spec references.

> Lastly, the FreeDesktop entry files have also associate programs with media
> types, and as you probably noticed, this is in the scope of section 9.7
> (Multimedia handlers), so please let us know your thougts or suggestions

It hasn't been within what I have been looking at so far, but I think that we 
could gain a lot by consolidating on desktop files also for this type of 
information.

/Sune
-- 
Do you know how may I explore with the SCSI space bar?

>From Flash you either should mount a AGP software, or never have to telnet 
from the connector for unmounting the hardware.


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