can someone explain what's the deal with this "old" and "new" menu
stuff?
util/wm-oldmenu2new is there since about '98, which means "new" is
almost legal age now, so "old" is like... ancient old.
there are lots if menus in WindowMaker/, mostly because of
localization, both in old and new format.
the code that deals with old menus is not too much, but it does get
hairy here and there, especially where it runs the menu through cpp.
i've been eyeing to kill this, but wouldn't want to leave anyone
hanging in the cold, or at least know what needs to be implemented
back (possibly in a different way).
as far as i can _imagine_, the old menu format is simple so other
(distro?) tools can chew them. on debian, there's some menu stuff that
does something to something else, and then it results in something
probably useful to someone. how much it is dependent on the old menu
format, no idea.
then there's the lot in WindowMaker/ which i figure is mostly junk --
you can't possibly pre-create a _useful_ default menu. at the same
time however, they are easy to translate.
in this arena, i would kill this thing altogether, then embrace and
extend carlos' wmgenmenu idea. it needs to be extended a bit so you
can specify app labels in a gettextable way (ie instad of "oowriter
exec oowriter" you could get _("openoffice.org wörte scheriber") exec
oowriter" (sorry german people, mein deutsch ist rostig ;P). that
would create a _real_ (no junk) menu, is easy to translate using
established gettext tools, centralized (you fix stuff in one place),
and last but not least uses wutil to write proplist files. not that
there's anything wrong with writing proplist files by hand. to a
certain point :)
the flip side is that you need to be able to write a bit c to modify
the menu, but then again, it is only a default (shall we say
"fallback", if nothing else exists) menu, so in a sense, one
containing xterm, wprefs, restart and exit is just about more than
enough, anything atop of that is a nice touch. people then modify
their menus using wprefs or whatever.
i do not really get the point of the menu-stuff in debian (does
anything similar exist in other distros?), but from the looks of it,
generalization took its toll, but if all else fails, it's not very
hard to give them an application that generates a plist menu from then
old menu format, this way debian (or anyone else) can keep their menu
generation with slight tweaks, and i could kill code only used for
this (afaict).
comments?
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