In the interests of standardation ...
I sangged the below from the Caldera mailing list. It describes a method
that Red Hat has come up with so that packages can add themselves to the
menus of different window managers when the package is installed. It is
GPLed and looks like a good idea.
George Bonser
Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?
http://www.debian.org
Debian/GNU Linux ... the maintainable operating system.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 1997 21:06:12 -0500
From: Donnie Barnes <djb@redhat.com>
Reply-To: caldera-users@rim.caldera.com
To: caldera-users@rim.caldera.com
Subject: Re: StarOffice
>Since there are many different widely-used window managers, it would be
>very hard to design an installation program that would work for them all..
>to do it, you would have to add different routines for each major window
>manager, and there is still no way you could cover them all. IMHO, there
>should be a common design so that the programmers of installation programs
>and such only have to write one routine to add icons. This would also help
>the users just switching to linux from windows, because many of them do
>not want to go through the time to learn how to add their own icons, etc
>(which can still be quite difficult for a newbie in some window
>managers..)
>
>Please feel free to correct anything which may have developed since I last
>looked into window managers and such. =)
Well, I designed something to get moving in that direction called
wmconfig. Cristian Gafton actually implemented it and it's now available
in RH 5.0. It's GPL'ed and I'd love to see people use it.
The basic concept is that each package contains config files that
live in /etc/X11/wmconfig that define the menu entry in a generic
way. The user can also override those entries in their home directory
(~/.wmconfig).
There is then an app called 'wmconfig' that processes the information
in all those files into window manager specific menu entries (it
is a C program that is architected to be modular in nature...it can
currently handle fvwm2, afterstep, and mwm style output). You still
have to use some help to get that data into a config file...in RH
we use fvwm2's m4 pre-processing to do it. You could hack any WM
pretty easily to support this.
The key is that the data is generic and should be easy to deal with
by another external program. I'd love to see someone take the time
to write a drag-n-drop program to let you add, remove, and edit
wmconfig entries...with luck we'll do it in the not so distant
future, but if someone wanted to contribute it, well... ;-)
I'm not trying to sell RH with this...I'd love to see Caldera
and other distributions use this method so that packages started
shipping with wmconfig entries.
--Donnie
--
Donnie Barnes http://www.redhat.com/~djb djb@redhat.com "Bah."
Challenge Diversity. Ignore People. Live Life. Use Linux. 879.
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