Hi Scott,
Thanks for the detailed explanation - a complicated problem indeed. I'd
agree that the XDG folks didn't seem to consult very widely when they
laid out the standard categories. If it were up to me, I'd invent an
Engineering category (or maybe Electronics) and stick Eagle in there.
While it may not fit the XDG standard, it's a lot more intuitive than
any of the existing cats. It makes things very confusing when each
engineering app appears in a different menu. And yes, I've noticed some
very odd things appearing in Education.
Cheers,
Arthur
On 27/09/2010 17:15, Scott Howard wrote:
On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 3:27 AM, Arthur Magill<[email protected]> wrote:
Package: eagle
Version: 5.10.0-1
Severity: minor
Subject says it all. This is a very minor bug. Under Gnome, Eagle appears in
the Programming menu, which seems like the wrong place. It also appears,
correctly, under the electronics menu.
Thanks for testing and bringing this up.
This is actually a more complicated bug then it seems at first.
Debian's menu items must conform to the freedesktop.org specification
[1], which requires that a program be included in one of the following
main categories [2]:
AudioVideo A multimedia (audio/video) application
Audio An audio application Desktop entry must include AudioVideo as well
Video A video application Desktop entry must include AudioVideo as well
Development An application for development
Education Educational software
Game A game
Graphics Graphical application
Network Network application such as a web browser
Office An office type application
Settings Settings applications Entries may appear in a separate menu
or as part of a "Control Center"
System System application, "System Tools" such as say a log viewer or
network monitor
Utility Small utility application, "Accessories"
When I adopted the package, it was already listed as "Development," so
I kept it there. Engineering/Electronics applications don't really fit
in any of those, and this is a "known bug" of the freedesktop
specification [3]. The Debian electronics packaging team came up with
their own solution [4-5]:
""Engineering;Electronics;" are used as application categories, they
_are_ non-standard, but categories such as (Education and Science) are
completely inappropriate for the engineering applications maintained
by the team.
This course of action does cause lintian to give
desktop-entry-lacks-main-category warnings, and those warnings are
ignored.
Also, extra-xdg-menus is to be added to the Recommends field (in
debian/control) to provide menu categories for Electronics
applications."
However, discussions with DDs outside of the team found this to be
sub-optimal since (1) if it isn't a bug then lintian should be fixed
so that we aren't just ignoring a warning in every package we maintain
and (2) if you remove extra-xdg-menus (which is possible since it is
only a "Recommends") you get a blank spot (or a question mark icon in
Ubuntu derivatives) in the menu tree that will hold eagle.
So, for now, we have to choose one of the above list of categories
(right now it is "Development"). We are also listing it as
Engineering;Electronics; and "Recommends" the extra-xdg-menus package
so users get the "Electronics" menu where it makes sense for them to
find it.
We can change which main category it is assigned to, although I would
like to avoid that because users are used to finding it in the
misleading "Development" menu and "Science" "Education" and "Graphics"
don't make any sense either. We also can remove it from the
electronics menu so it only appears in one spot in the menu. However,
users already can do that individually be removing the extra-xdg-menus
package or by running exmenen and exmendis.
[1] http://lintian.debian.org/tags/desktop-entry-lacks-main-category.html
[2] http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/1.0/apa.html
[3] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2009-October/011086.html
[4]
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-electronics-devel/2009-November/001282.html
[5] http://wiki.debian.org/PkgElectronics
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