Re: Adding installed packages to menu
On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 11:41:06PM +0900, Bret Busby <bret@busby.net> was heard to say:
>> It would seem logical, given one point of view, but as I mentioned
>> previously, that's not the behaviour that I desire from a package manager
>> any more than I want a link to the executable binary automagically added
>> to the desktop. There are more than 1000 Debian developers, worldwide,
>> and they vote as to how things are handled by default, perhaps there is a
>> logical plan.
>>
>>
>
> And, as I had said, it had not occurred to me, that packages would have
> different developers/maintainers, for each distribution.
>
> Thus, apparently, the differences in installation, between different
> distributions.
>
> I assume that some applications, like GRAMPS, GnuCash, and PotgreSQL (to
> give a variety of different types of applications), have the same
> developers/maintainers, for all distributions, with possibly different
> developers working on different version numbers of the applications?
In general, each software project has people who work just on the
software project, and different people make the packages for different
distributions. Occasionally, one individual makes packages for several
distributions (e.g., some Ubuntu employees are also Debian developers
and work on the same packages in both cases), but even then the
packaging might be different to conform to the conventions of the
different distributions.
This is actually a very efficient way of doing things, because
writing software and creating packages to distribute it are fairly
dissimilar domains of expertise, and it's useful to separate out the
roles. Even in software I write and package myself, I'm usually
working on one or the other at any given moment.
In this particular case: the package list for flightgear includes
/usr/share/applications/flightgear.desktop, which makes me think that
it *should* get a menu entry. Is that right? Does that file exist on
your system? What are its contents?
> I think that that would make a good package development standard - for
> packages that are installed on a system, that could be run from a menu,
> to, at the completion of installation, generate a dialogue box that
> incorporates the option to have the application automatically added to
> the Applications menu hierarchy; something like (in this case) "The
> Flight Gear package installation has completed. Do you want it
> automatically added to the Applications menu hierarchy? Enter "y" for
> yes > ".
That sounds good, until you install a few dozen programs at once
*shudder*. Better to have the menu items always installed, and then
have some of them disabled by default, with an easy way to re-enable
them. e.g., it looks like in Gnome, I can right-click on Applications
and pick "Edit Menus", and choose whether or not various menu items
appear.
Daniel
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