On Thu, Dec 04, 2003 at 12:19:28PM +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote: | On Thu, Dec 04, 2003 at 12:34:22AM +0100, Raphael Goulais wrote: | > On Wednesday 03 December 2003 21:31, Zenaan Harkness wrote: | > > I agree. I would like to see .desktop standard adopted. There have been | > > a few threads I have seen so far, and there seems to be some level of | > > resistance to the idea. | > | > The silly question is : What does our actual menu system provide that | > shouldn't be achieved by using .desktop file ? | > | > As those are going to be a standard, we should deal with them. | | You could swap "our menu system" and ".desktop files" here and your | argument would still be about as valid.
I don't think that this is the case. As I understand it, .desktop files have the advantage that they are already shipped by a number of upstream packages, support i18n better than Debian menus, are supported natively by KDE and Gnome, include facilities for providing stuff like generic names and are supported by the freedesktop.org folk. The main advantage of the Debian menu system, on the other hand, seems to be that it is already in place in most .debs which provide menu entries and menu methods. (The above was gleaned from reading past threads, BTW, not from intimate knowledge of the two systems. The worst situation, IMHO, is to see the two mesh poorly, such as the KDE menus which show "Debian" submenus under a lot of categories, presenting applications with .desktop entries separately from those which only have Debian menu entries.) Cameron.