On Fri, Apr 09, 2010 at 08:38:27PM +0200, Tamas TEVESZ wrote:
> 
> i do not really get the point of the menu-stuff in debian (does 
> anything similar exist in other distros?),

It's the same sort of idea as wmgenmenu, except more flexible. Instead
of hard-coding every possible options in, each package provides
information on what it wants to appear in the menu. And instead of
hard-coding an output format, each package that has an application menu
provides a script that takes in all that information and outputs the
menu in that program's particular file format.

So for example, if I install rxvt-unicode it drops a file in
/usr/share/menu/rxvt-unicode and then every program that has a
menu-making script gets it to show up immediately. Whereas with
wmgenmenu, I would need to edit wmgenmenu.h and recompile it. And if I
want to add a menu entry for "WindowMaker (dev)" to launch the version I
just compiled for testing in /usr/local/src, all I need to do is drop a
file in /etc/menu/ and run update-menus.

debian/README.Debian has a rationale from 1999 about why the proplist
menu format couldn't be used back then; I don't know if whatever the
problem was has since been fixed or not.


-- 
To unsubscribe, send mail to [email protected].

Reply via email to