On September 26, 2005 06:04, you wrote:
> This is not the resposibility of the Debian menu. The Debian menu
> supplies ways for packages to register as something to be shown in
> menus, together with type of the entry (like "wm" for window manager),
> and additional, even free-form information.
> It's the task of things showing a menu, like gdm or kdm, to supply
> a /etc/menu-methods file with rules how to create the data in a form
> the things showing a menu can use it.
> For an example of creating .desktop files take a look into
> /etc/menu-methods/gnome-panel-data from gnome-panel-data package.
> (Though I do not know if that gets the escaping correctly)
> Why it only creates .desktop files for X-Applications ("x11")
> and Terminal-Programs ("text"), but not for window managers ("wm")
> I do not know. Perhaps the format is different or they have to be placed
> in another directory or whatever.

Yes, as I wrote in another post to d-devel (you are subscribed? I assumed 
you were, sorry if I was wrong), menu-xdg would be the place to do this. I 
also listed many reasons why even this is not trivial to implement 
properly, and has problems.

> > kdm provides a number of these session files itself at the moment,
> > covering most of the window managers in Debian, fortunately, but
> > upstream has mused about removing them, and with good reason, since it
> > is hardly the job of a display manager to carry - and be obliged to
> > maintain - a catalogue of window managers.
>
> Indeed. But it is also not the job of the window manager to maintain a
> catalog of all display managers and what format they like today for
> their entries. That's what the Debian menu structure is there in
> between.

Maintaining ONE file is not a 'catalogue'. This one file works with all 
freedesktop.org display managers. No other display managers require such 
registration, and any future DMs will almost certainly adhere to 
freedesktop.org standards, which are very unlikely to change substantively, 
now that so many things use them.

> > If you don't want to bother providing such support in wm2, then don't,
> > but given the trivial effort of adding such support, and the virtually
> > nil effort required to maintain it, I fail to see what is so terribly
> > ugly or difficult about the situation. If the Debian menu plans to
> > automate this for you at some point in the future, great. Until then...
>
> As I already wrote, that is no trivial support. It is another place to
> put paths, descriptions, icons, translations. And another place to do
> it wrong, meaning testing also requires installing different dm's to
> see all this works. Plus it is simply the wrong solution to the wrong
> problem.

Yes it is trivial to support. Trust me, I've done it. You can copy and paste 
the blackbox.desktop file, and change all instances of 'blackbox' to 'wm2' 
and odds are it will work. Tweak as needed in the obvious way if not. 
Install kdm or gdm, and test once. In the time it took you to write these 
e-mails you could have added support a dozen times. And you have yet to 
offer persuasive reasons why it is the 'wrong solution to the wrong 
problem.' It seems to work well for the more popular window managers 
already. I certainly haven't seen them, or any users or sysadmins, complain 
(I discussed this more in my posts to d-devel, FYI).

Cheers,
Christopher Martin


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