On 19-Jun-99, 16:16 (CDT), Joey Hess <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Well the alternative that has been brought up before is to make everything > use a deeper tree (like Apps/Editors/Big/Emacsen), and have menu > automatically collapse the tree to Apps/Editors on your system with 2 editors > and keep the big tree on mine (that has every editor installed). > > The only differences between doing it this way and the hints way are that: > > 1. The hints way is a lot cooler conceptually. :-) > 2. The collapsing tree way doesn't allow merging of menus like Apps/Sound > and Apps/Viewers into Apps/Multimedia. > 3. The collapsing tree way means that you always find stuff where you'd > expect it, you just may not decend as deep in the hierarch as you > expected to. > > #2 is a big drawback but at the same time makes things more consitent too,
I disagree strongly; #2 is a definite plus. It's ok, and even a good thing, to allow submenus to merge when they only have a few entries. Allowing items to move to completely different trees is, IMO, a bad thing. Consider that things like xdvi and tkman should be under "Apps/Viewers". It would never occur to me that they could be under "Apps/Multimedia"; If I found them there, I would submit a bug to the package maintainers (who might well disagree with me, but none-the-less). Hmmm, a little more thought leads me to the conclusion that things like xdvi and tkman wouldn't end up under "Apps/Multimedia" (because their hintlists wouldn't include "multimedia", but instead somewhere over in the text tree, perhaps. Is that correct? I still don't think that I like the idea of the menu tree being re-arranged (except the addition and removal of subtrees) just because I install a new package. It seems like "collapsible deep trees" would get most of the benefit and be a lot less confusing than the hints system, cool as it is. Steve
