On Sun, 2002-10-06 at 01:55, Havoc Pennington wrote:
>
> You realize the implication of that is that we have to be brutally
> ruthless about what's in the default install (i.e. anything in Extras
> in the default install can no longer be in the default install, and
> this may require some weird package splitting, something like
> gnome-utils-base, gnome-utils-extra).
I agree with the original poster that the Extras menu has to go. I have
been a RH user since 4.1 and I appreciate what RH is trying to do but
this is the wrong way, imho.
My suggestion is to break apart packages but don't assume that one
necessarily has to be "Extra" and one primary. Your Extra might be my
primary. At home I use Gnucash daily to manage my finances which has NO
alternate in the primary menus yet I have to fumble through the Extra
menu to load it.
This would be more then just packaging, but would it be possible to
create a sub-menu type in Gnome that if it contained only one
application would just show the menu as an application item but if it
had more then one it would act as a regular menu and show each
application with it's name.
For example: If I have just Mozilla installed I see
Menu
+ Internet
+ Web Browser
as it is now. If I add Galeon then the menu appears as:
Menu
+ Internet
+ Web Browser
+ Mozilla
+ Galeon
So if it had one option then this special submenu would know to subsume
it's content and if it had more then one it should show it as we have
come to expect in previous RH versions.
Then on the packaging side the packages would have to be finer grained
I suspect that this would require some coding and quite a bit more
packaging work but I think that this might be a way to keep both the new
users and power users happy. This arrangement has two primary
advantages: simple users with simple requirements who take the default
install don't have to learn that "Mozilla" == "Web Browser" and power
users who have everything installed can see "Mozilla" and "Galeon" so
they don't have to learn that "Web Browser" == "Mozilla" :)
I know that if I had to place a client on an all-Linux network on 8.0
right now and they needed something on the Extras menu they would not
understand and complain about it. The current setup is fine but only if
you are the user with the exact needs RH is catering to. It doesn't
work well for anyone else because of it's rigidity.
One additional thought to the above is that is there was some way in the
menu items themselves (or maybe a config file) to mark a "Primary"
application out of the group then there could be a preferences setting
for "Basic" and "Advanced" so that even if a workstation had a full
install the display could be per-user.
Just doing some brainstorming to try to help solve this problem. I'm
sure there are some flaws in my thinking somewhere.
Sean
PS: Other then the Extras thing and some Gnome 1 applets that haven't
been ported yet that I miss, I love the release! Definitely an overall
step in the right direction.
