Hi all, I've spent several days googling and experimenting with Gnome VFS and the Gnome panel trying to come up with a way to easily customize the Gnome menus for Componentized Linux in a way that 1. doesn't violate Debian policy; and 2. diverges from Debian as little as possible. One constraint is that, because CL is a toolkit for building custom distros, we want to make it easy for distro builders to provide their own custom menus. So, ideally, it's as simple as providing a package that supplies the custom menus, similarly to the cl-branding mechanism I outlined in the last message. Even more ideally, we can jointly come up with a way to do it that works for all CDDs and that can submitted to Debian proper post-sarge.
Here's what I've learned thus far: There are two ways to customize the Gnome menus: 1. editing the files in /etc/gnome-vfs-2.0/vfolders (and, in particular, applications-all-users.vfolder-info and preferences-all-users.vfolder-info, which specify the Applications and Preferences menus, respectively); and 2. editing the .desktop files supplied by the Debian packages to change the categories, which determine where in the menus the menu items appear (and that's assuming the custom distro is happy with the default menu structure). Number 1 seems to be a non-starter, as the files are all conffiles owned by the libgnomevfs2-common package. So, providing modified versions of these files would seem to require forking the libgnomevfs-2 package, something I'd really rather not have to do. To accomplish number 2, I could supply my own .desktop files in separate packages (e.g., evolution-defaults, which installs a modified evolution-2.0.desktop file somewhere that puts it in the Internet category rather than the Office category), but the default applications-all-users.vfolder-info file specifies /usr/share/applications first, so putting them in /etc/X11/applnk (also specified as a source in applications-all-users.vfolder-info) either results in duplicate menu entries (if I give the .desktop files different names) or in the default menu entries being shown (if I use the same names as /usr/share/applications). So, it seems like the best way forward is to divert the .desktop files in /usr/share/applications, but I'm not particularly keen on doing this either, as I'll have to divert dozens and dozens of files, and I still don't have a way of changing the menu structure if I want to do that. How are other CDDs dealing with this? I've read that some of you are using cfengine to replace conffiles, but that would seem to suffer from the same problem as diverting a conffile, i.e., upgrades are not dealt with particularly gracefully. In other words, it's not a particularly good idea for the same reason it's not a particularly good idea to divert conffiles, with the only difference being that it doesn't technically violate Debian policy. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) -- Ian Murdock 317-578-8882 (office) http://www.progeny.com/ http://ianmurdock.com/ "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of." --Ogden Nash
