On Sun January 21 2007 16:29, Charles Plessy wrote: > Le Sun, Jan 21, 2007 at 06:04:09AM -0700, Bruce Sass a écrit : > > I also agree that automatic down-converting would be good, but > > think that automatic generation of menus from pieces at package > > install time would be better. Iow, build a <prg>.menu.common for > > every interactive program and use > > <prg>.menu.[freedesktop|kde|gnome|some-de] for Desktop Environment > > specific bits, then require the menu producers be able to construct > > a menu entry from the pieces via infrastructure provided routines. > > As the .desktop format becomes a de facto standard, we are more and > more in a situation where the .menu files have to be written from a > .desktop file. In a system where the .desktop files used in Debian > would be generated from the Debian .menu file, this would lead to a > double conversion.
Requiring the ability to produce a menu entry from pieces is not the same as requiring that all entries be produced from pieces. Conversion is not necessary if the infrastructure allows a DE to ignore all but the .menu.DE bit for apps saying they have a native menu for that DE. Simply being able to flag a .menu.DE bit as being "complete" would probably work, but it may be more flexible if it was possible for an app to indicate to a DE's menu producer which bits it needs to piece together. > If persons are willing to work on improving the Debian menu system, I > would rather advocate using the .desktop format as a native > configuration file. This way we could take advantage of existing > information, and also contribute back our work to the the upstream > developpers when a menu entry is created from scratch for Debian. I have no problem with the .desktop format. The freedesktop standard can not be expected to accommodate non-freedesktop based systems though. - Bruce