Thomas Adam <[email protected]> writes:

> On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 11:16:02PM +0100, Michael Treibton wrote:
> So as for timescales:  Personally, I am still working on my xdg-menu
> replacement, but it's slow since it's bloody boring, and the script I am
> basing it off pretty much sucks.  So I am going through the XDG
> specification myself since that's easiest.  The big problem though, is like
> FvwmTabs, this script *unavoidably* relies on external  perl modules not
> under FVWM's control.  In this case:   XML::Simple which in turn has to
> depend on XML::Parser -- something I am not keen on for two reasons:
>
> 1.  Downstream maintainers have to consider the impact of their
> dependencies.
>
> 2.  Perhaps more importantly, we have a number of users who compile FVWM up
> themselves, or we have environments where FVWM is deployed in rather
> interesting circumstances (perhaps you've alluded to one below, in your
> deployment scenario?) -- out-of-the-box, FVWM won't "work", due to these
> external dependencies not being part of most base-perl installs.  It was OK
> for FvwmTabs, that has a handy TK dialogue to tell you as such -- but for
> a script a number of people are using, and *will* be using, it's slightly
> frustrating.

Pretty much agree but XML parsing from Perl isn't that rare.
Especially for users that will want auto generated menus.
As long as it's an optional feature, I think it's okay.

> So that's where we are.  I am almost done with the XDG-menu work, I now need
> to make it an almost like-for-like copy to fvwm-menu-desktop, and deprecate
> some options that don't make sense from fvwm-menu-desktop anymore as well as
> write a manpage for it.  Then it needs to go through a crap-load of testing
> on a number of different environments (I am hoping Dan Espen can help with
> this -- he likes these XDG menus a lot more than I do.  :)).

I find myself using the XDG menus a bit more lately but for stuff I use
all the time I still can't stand a bunch of non-hotkeyed menus.
It's really for stuff I use rarely and can't remember the command line
for.

> If you or *anyone* else wanted to actually help, by all means look at
> writing more purify tests -- that alone would likely throw up some
> interesting bugs if they were structured properly -- I have several ideas on
> how to improve these tests, so if anyone is seriously interested, do please
> ask me!

As I remember, Dominik created the tests and I took one pass thru the
man pages vs. the tests.  It was a horrible, boring experience, one I
never wanted to repeat again.

I thought maybe we could come up with a scheme were when a new command
was written, we'd add comments to the source code that could be
auto-generated into test cases.  Sadly, I think the plan was too
ambitious.

I think the Purify tests put too much of a burden on the project and
we shouldn't put a lot of effort into them.

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