On Fri, May 26, 2000 at 04:41:13PM +0200, Guillaume Cottenceau wrote:
> David Faure <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> > > Yes, David, but with our menu-system, all manually created kdelnk shall be
> > > deleted..
> >
> > Which shows a major flaw somewhere. That menu system is cool per se, but unless
> > all distributions adopt it, it creates a major incompatibility not only
> > between distributions but also compared to the core product,
> > and it makes support more complex for the KDE/gnome/... developers.
> > Distributions are doing more and more distribution-specific changes,
> > and it's getting more and more difficult for the free-software
> > developers to understand what's going on with their own software
> > and why users have trouble with it !
> >
> > Don't think that the distributions can handle the users questions. Rightfully
> > most questions go to the project developers themselves, or the mailing-lists/
> > newsgroups, and they are often more likely to be answered there than
> > e.g. here (most mandrake-fun questions are not answered, whereas I make
> > sure most questions on comp.windows.x.kde are). Anyway, the point is,
> > differenciation between distros leads to fragmentation - quite strange
> > to say that about that feature which is about unification, but true.
>
> Sad but true..
And another example is the window-managers file. Pretty neat, but inconsistent
too - with the same results. "kdmrc is rewritten at the next reboot" has been
a problem for many users... including me. But now I give specific instructions
to Mandrake 7.x users, so that they edit window-managers instead.
> I don't know what we should do for that. At the present time, users will
> certainly try to edit the kdelnk with the builtin KDE editor for example,
> and notice that their brand new stuff is deleted at each install of
> another mandrake package :-(.
Right.
> I don't know the position of Redhat, Suse, etc, about this Debian-designed
> menusystem. I personally think it's good, it adds more useability to
> end-user.
Then it would be a good idea to talk to those distribs, and get them
on board too.
> However, to be honest, it leads to big trouble at present time. For
> example, the nice png's of Gnome are converted to xpm's, so the
> transperencies are mainly lost, and they appear real bad.
KDE 2.x uses pngs too, so the menu system should really be improved
to support pngs.
> Some packages come with their own .kdelnk or .desktop and these files come
> deleted. So external [eg Redhat] packages will lead to much problems now.
> I don't know a good solution to address that problem :-(.
Well it should be fairly simple in theory: the menu system should only
deal with what it knows about, and leave untouched the .kdelnk or .desktop
files that come from external packages.
The current behaviour, instead, is quite ... aggressive. I suppose
this was to make the migration easier (deleting the existing kdelnk/desktop
files), but rpm -U could have done that instead, no ?
Deleting something that the user or an external packages could have
provided is always a bad thing to do, in any case.
--
David FAURE
[EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://home.clara.net/faure/
KDE, Making The Future of Computing Available Today
