[arch-projects] Debian menu program

[Jason Chu]

On Sat, Aug 28, 2004 at 09:30:11PM -0500, Ben Mazer wrote:
> 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. 

I was refering specifically to the menu standard.

> > 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. 

The problem with writing one from scratch is that you'll run into all the
same complaints people had with menu version 1 (some menus have a few
items, others too many, etc).  That's why I suggested version 2 because it
fixes a lot of these problems.  Why do something that's does the bare
minimum when doing more could be just as easy?

I don't remember what actually made it depend on dpkg, we may not need that
functionality at all.

Adding update-menus to the foo.install script is bad.  Then everything will
depend on it.  That's why I wanted it seperated totally.  As I said, I
don't remember what was actually needed from dpkg in the first place.

Jason

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