On Sun January 21 2007 02:24, Steve Langasek wrote: > On Wed, Jan 17, 2007 at 09:22:57AM +0100, Loïc Minier wrote: > > On Wed, Jan 17, 2007, Charles Plessy wrote: > > > am I wrong or one can have foo.png in foo.desktop, and foo.xpm in > > > foo.menu? If upstream does not provide an xpm icon, the "convert" > > > command of the imagemagick package can easily create one at build > > > time. > > > > My point is that I shouldn't have to maintain both, or to run > > convert each time this is necessary. > > While it would be good to have infrastructure to support automatic > down-converting to the Debian menu standard where appropriate, you > can probably see that converting, say, a 64x64 png to a 32x32 xpm is > going to give inferior results than if an icon is provided that was > created for the target resolution; so having menu itself > automatically import .desktop files at runtime doesn't sound like a > good idea to me.
If by "runtime" you mean when a user logs in or accesses a menu hierarchy, that would likely result in annoying performance issues for slower boxes which would be worse than any potential icon quality problems. Icon quality is a bit of a red herring anyways, imo; as long as those 16x16 blobs of colours are distinct from each other they serve their purpose, and don't most icon using desktops automatically scale icons if necessary. I also agree that automatic down-converting would be good, but think that automatic generation of menus from pieces at package install time would be better. Iow, build a <prg>.menu.common for every interactive program and use <prg>.menu.[freedesktop|kde|gnome|some-de] for Desktop Environment specific bits, then require the menu producers be able to construct a menu entry from the pieces via infrastructure provided routines. Assuming the existing menu infrastructure is working OK and the code is in reasonably good shape, adding support for {/usr/share,~,etc}/menu/{freedesktop,gnome,kde,some-de} should be a straightforward extension of how the standard menus are currently handled. - Bruce