Re: Desktop menu categories
On 8/18/07, Carlo Segre <segre@iit.edu> wrote:
>
> I was just looking through the menu and .desktop file categories so that I
> could bring my packages into compliance with the latest version of lintian
> in unstable. The menu files work OK with
>
> Applications/Science/Data Analysis
>
> for a section but the .desktop categories are really problematic. In
> order to avoid the lintian error, I had to put the categories as
>
> Education;Science;DataVisualization
>
> The requirement is to have a main category and a subcategory. The
> subcategories are already associated with main categories and "Science"
> and "DataVisualization" are both required to be associated with
> "Education". I think that this is definitely a problem because many
> data analysis packages aren't really appropriate in an Education category.
>
> The details of the freedesktop specification of categories is at:
>
> http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/1.0/apa.html
>
> Does anyone have suggestions as to how to get this changed?
I wrote the freedesktop.org xdg mailing list about this issue back in
June [1]. My proposal was to romote Science to a main category. There
was concern about how to deal with legacy issues. What happens if
somebody installs a .desktop on an "older" distro (say etch or Fedora
Core 6)? Hopefully the menu item would be dropped to the "Other"
submenu, but I'm not sure we can guarantee that, especially because of
a Gnome bug [2] that recently got fixed that required Application to
be a category, which is not in the freedesktop.org spec. I personally
think it's worth the possible legacy problems to get it right for the
future.
If people are really interested in freeing Science from the "tyranny"
of Education then I can submit a patch to the menu spec and see where
it goes. I as going to back in June but got sidetracked with life.
-Jordan Mantha
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