On Sat, Jul 05, 2008 at 03:15:28AM -0500, William Pitcock wrote: > Hi, > > On Sat, 2008-07-05 at 02:42 -0400, Daniel Dickinson wrote: > > For discussion: > > > > Gnome, KDE, and XFCE are the the top three desktops used in debian and > > cover most users of desktops in debian. > > > > They all use xdg .desktop-based menus as their main menu. > > > > xdg .desktop-based menus are not covered by policy. > > Honestly, policy really needs to be updated to use the XDG standards > menu spec, and every WM at this point really should be using them for > their menus. > > I think the debian-menu system should be seen as legacy, since it has > been replaced with a standard used and supported by many upstreams and > many other distros. > > However, there's a few places where debian-menu is a better solution > though. (It can be used to build menus for many WMs which do not support > XDG, but honestly, do we need all these WMs?)
First of all: Yes, we do. Personally, I prefer not to use one of those 'desktop environment' thingies, since they annoy me. One of the main reasons why people use Linux is choice; we should give them that choice, not take it away and give users a pre-chewed monocultural environment (if you want that, go to Windows, MacOS, or Ubuntu). Second: XDG has less features than debian-menu currently does. For instance, unless I'm mistaken it's not possible to specify in an XDG .desktop file that a particular application is a curses or similar application that requires an xterm or some such, which is possible with menu. Due to this feature, it's also possible to have a package like pdmenu for non-graphical systems. > Another solution would be to make debian-menu build .desktop entries for > the menu in the main menu namespace and not the 'Debian' namespace; this > seems like the easiest solution. The separation of a Debian menu and a "desktop" menu has been seen by some as a feature. I remember a post on Planet Debian by one of the GNOME maintainers (although I don't recall who it was) who explicitly said that he would not like to see non-GNOME applications in the GNOME menu but outside the Debian section. It is not unreasonable to state that it may be confusing for people to have a menu containing both GNOME and non-GNOME applications on a shared system; after all, different UI toolkits often have different UI guidelines and concepts; mixing those is not necessarily a good idea. -- <Lo-lan-do> Home is where you have to wash the dishes. -- #debian-devel, Freenode, 2004-09-22 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
