Hey all, I'm kind of stuck in a library naming problem right now. I'm working on an implementation of the XDG menu specification. For a while this project had the name "libxfce4menu" but with a recent API redesign and reimplementation came interest from others to use it in e.g. Alacarte. Of course I could've sticked to "libxfce4menu" ... but with the rewrite I felt that it was time to give it a more generic name to encourage other people to use it outside of Xfce.
The plan was to rename it to "gdesktopmenu" (with classes like GDesktopMenu or GDesktopMenuParser). The "g"/"G" prefix should've expressed that it is written for GLib-based applications mainly. However, with C++, C#, Vala and other languages using namespaces, this library would either end up in the "GLib" namespace or in "GDesktop". Both seem inappropriate. I then thought about "dmenu" (for "d(esktop) menu", sorta like "D-Bus" or "dconf"). But then I wouldn't know in what namespace it ends up in. So ... I'm kind of lost. The library will be used by Xfce, presumably by Alacarte. I think the API design (once we have the MenuEditor, MenuWriter and more fine-grained monitoring signals) is very powerful [1]. It keeps the <Menu> tree and the menu items (aka desktop entries) more or less separated and allows for easy modifications of both. It might be interesting for GNOME as well. I've heard rumors about gnome-menus being a little unpleasant to work with. The current status can be found on [2]. What prefix would you suggest? I suppose that "xdg" (with GObject classes like XdgMenu and Vala/C#/C++ classes like XDG.Menu or Xdg.Menu) only makes sense if it's widely accepted/used. Or should I just use it, hoping the library will gain popularity soon? How do you handle this in your libraries (those that are not tied to any particular desktop environment)? How about a new namespace for widely used desktop libraries that are not necessarily XDG reference implementations? A lot of questions, I know. I'd be happy to get some feedback on this. Worst case scenario is that I have to come up with a entirely fresh name for it. - Jannis [1] http://tinyurl.com/dxjxs3 (blog post about the new API) [2] http://git.xfce.org/jannis/libxfce4menu/tree/?branch=parser-rewrite
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