On Sat, 2004-08-28 at 18:07, Jason Chu wrote:
Many people have suggested a universal menu system (one that can keep every WMs menu up to date with all the packages installed on the system). People say that the freedesktop standard will do that for us and all we have to do is wait for WMs to support it. Personally, I think it'll be a while before all the WMs support the freedesktop standard and I'm not sure if we really should wait.
Well, most of the other freedesktop standards were incorporated very quickly. Everyone uses the official WM hints. KDE and GNOME both support the Desktop and Menu format. There's some other standards that have become popular as well.
Debian had a solution to this problem in the form of its menu program. The menu program consisted of a directory called /usr/share/menu that you stored a menu file in (the menu file describes categories, command names, and titles of programs; each package gets one but can describe multiple programs in a single file), definitions to create menus for each WM, and an update-menus script.
I looked at the format and program, and it all sees too complex and monolithic for the Arch style. Would anyone be opposed to me trying to write one from scratch, to be very simple (but get the job done)? I would rather it be Pacman independent. You'd write a menu file by hand, and then you can just run update-menus from the foo.install script. Doesn't seem to need any more integration than that. I don't have a problem with the actual menu hierarchy though. I see no reason why we can't follow that.
*ge/gis/ger are the newly proposed third person singular gender-neutral pronouns. Ge is similar to he, gis to his, and ger to him.
That's stupid. :) Ben -- I was overjoyed when, having bought a Fujifilm camera, I realized I could justify having /mnt/fuji on my system. -- /.