Hello Charles, On 02.02.2014 14:00, Charles Plessy wrote: [...] > I think that the absence of a feature in the Debian Policy is not a good > justification for refusing a patch that is not invasive and does not require > further attention. > > We should assume people's good faith on both sides. Because a counter-argument > to yours would be that "people will use the presence of the Debian menu in the > Debian policy as a justification to file serious bugs on packages and bully > maintainers to do a work that they do not want to contribute by themselves". It depends on the wording. Someone who "bullied" maintainers about menu files in the past and filed serious bugs against such packages was wrong and simply abused the severity level. The Policy recommended menu files but without ever using the word "must". I think it is more likely and thus a greater danger, that people drop menu files from working packages because of missing support by Debian's Policy, than that we will see antisocial behavior from promoting the Debian menu as an alternative menu system. But to make my point of view clear: I agree with Sune's proposal to soften the wording of Debian's policy regarding menu files. It is completely sensible to recommend the xdg menu for all desktop applications. In my opinion policy should give clear advice for maintainers to provide these desktop files. I just don't see the urgent need to move the Debian menu to the attic right now. I would like to ask the Policy editors to consider the following: 1. The maintainer of Debian's menu package, Bill Allombert, is active and still supportive of his package. (See his remarks in this thread) 2. The Debian menu is well documented and mature. It just works for its target audience. 3. Creating and maintaining menu files is not a burden, especially if someone wrote the menu file for the maintainer and provided a patch. 4. Not all but a lot of packages already ship menu files. In some areas of Debian menu file support is already excellent. To be more precise, out of 353 source packages in main which are maintained by the Debian Games Team, only 17 are missing either a desktop or menu file or both. > As you probably see in your release goal, there are packages from your own team > that have bugs tagged desktop-integration related to menus, which are old of > multiple monthes and still not fixed. From this I conclude that the problem is > not obstruction from a minority of maintainers, but lack of manpower. Lack of manpower is partly an issue but not decisive. Most bug reports were filed because of a missing icon entry for the menu file. That's a very minor issue and I only expect a fix for that if someone has to fix another problem or make a regular upload. > In that sense, I am getting concerned that having the Policy encouraging work > on the Debian Menu is counter-productive. If there is no vibrant community > to keep the Debian Menu alive (and your release goal brilliantly demonstrate > that there is not much momentum), then it is better to let it dissapear. As I have pointed out before, I rather think that suggesting the Debian menu as an alternative menu system is more beneficial for Debian's users than to let it disappear. In many packages there is already a working system in place. Why not make use of it and tolerate a single menu file? I would love to see the Debian Policy recommend desktop files but still suggest the Debian menu as an alternative. That's all. > Are you yourself a user of the Debian menu ? Yes, of course. You will find a lot of articles on my blog at gambaru.de how to build lightweight desktop environments and to make old hardware useful again. Unfortunately those articles are only available in German but feel free to contact me, if you need some advice in this area. Regards, Markus
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