Didier 'OdyX' Raboud writes ("Bug#741573: Proposed draft of ballot to resolve menu/desktop question"): > Right. But the 'trad Debian menu' (as outlined in Policy §9.6) has never > reached the point where "applications that need not be passed any > special command line arguments for normal operation" have a menu entry.
I'm not sure why you think this is relevant. Policy says every command line program should have a manpage, but we have many many command line programs without. That a project's coverage isn't complete is not a reason to throw it away. > I disagree that this is the real dispute: today, the trad Debian menu > application metadata database is de facto already of less relevance than > the (not-in-policy) the XDG Menu, by orders of magnitude. I don't understand why you think that something being of `less relevance' means it should be destroyed. > > (a) continue to be maintained in its existing file format > > > > (b) be translated to a new and more modern file format > > (perhaps only for some packages) > > > > (c) be destroyed. > > > > Given that there are people who want to maintain it, I think (c) is > > unacceptable. > > Keith's proposal doesn't imply that the trad menu would "be destroyed" > (your words), It does. There is nothing in Keith's proposal which preserves the existing trad menu metadata. According to `apt-file search' that is a database of 2296 menu entries (in wheezy). > On the other hand, if there are not enough users and maintainers for the > trad menu, I do find it unacceptable to further impose on all > maintainers (through a Policy "should") the burden of maintaining this > redundant metadata database, which is nowadays _de_facto_ replaced by > the technically superior XDG Menu. The XDG menu database does not contain a menu entry for many things that the trad menu does. And this is intentional. So it is not a replacement. Ian.