Bug#975631: debian-policy: window manager: remove reference to Debian menu
Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
> I considered whether instead of starting with a priority of 40, we
> should instead bump the priority if the window manager supports the
> desktop specification, but I think this is a place where the structure
> of X environments has changed over the years. It used to be that the
> window manager was what handled application menus, but now that's
> normally done by some other component of the desktop environment, or
> even just some toolbar app or other type of plugin that the user has
> chosen, and the window manager may be just a window manager.
> Given that, I don't think there's anything useful we can say here about
> menu management. Old-school window managers that don't use a desktop
> environment (fvwm2, for instance) may implement support for desktop
> files, or for the Debian menu system for that matter; newer ones are
> likely to not handle menus at all and expect some other component to
> deal with that.
I just found https://bugs.debian.org/838777, which says packages that only
provide a window manager without a mechanism for launching programs should
not register as x-window-manager. So I'm now not sure that just removing
the mention of the menu system is a complete fix and we may indeed need to
say something about handling *.desktop files, because x-window-manager may
really supposed to be a desktop environment.
I think we can keep this change in the next release because it doesn't
make anything worse, but we should probably also pursue #838777 and try to
document what x-window-manager is really for in the new X world. (This is
almost certainly going to require advice from the folks who work on
desktop environments, since I have no idea how x-window-manager is used
today.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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