On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 01:32:40PM -0800, Chris Waters wrote: > The last time I looked (circa Gnome1.2, IIRC), the system Gnome was > using was *wholly* inadequate as a replacement for Debian's menu > system. I've now looked at the new VFolder proposal, and it's a > little better, but I'm still not entirely sure it's adequate.
The current proposal is: http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/menu/draft/menu-spec/menu-spec.html which is a good bit more elaborate (and spelled-out) than the vfolder thing. > The main part that bothers me is: "The layout of the menu is left > up to the application displaying them." Debian's centralized scheme > doesn't require any modification to existing apps. All that's > required of Debian's menu scheme is that an app be able to use an > external automatically generated menu definition of some sort. The vfolder spec only specifies the Categories= stuff. The current menu proposal also specifies the menu layout XML file(s). > Furthermore, Debian's centralized approach allows either the admin or > the user to define centralized filters that apply to the entire > heirarchy. What do you mean by "centralized filters" - just disabling/enabling certain menu items? The .menu files in the new spec should allow people to rearrange the menus however they want. The idea in the new spec is that apps install the .desktop file (which contains info on the actual menu item), but the menu layout, and what actually appears in the menus, is all in the .menu config file(s). > The new VFolder proposal includes equivalents of Debian's hints (the > Categories), which is good, but it leaves it up to the apps what to do > with them (if anything). Debian's centralized scheme ensures > consistency here. I don't understand exactly what you mean by this. > There are other issues, and it's not entirely one-sided -- Debian's > system is complex and fragile, and prone to breakage. But I think > we've still got a ways to go before this can all be united in one > grand, happy scheme. Please check out the new spec, sorry the web site was a bit outdated. One nice thing is that if GNOME and KDE both use this (as it appears they will) you can get all the menu stuff in Debian packages into upstream tarballs, which presumably saves a lot of work. Havoc
