On Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:31:13 +0100
Sean Finney <sean...@debian.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 2011-03-03 at 23:01 +0100, Christoph Egger wrote:
> > Sune Vuorela <nos...@vuorela.dk> writes:
> > > (isn't it only icewm and ratpoison and blackbox we might 'lose' by
> > > simply killing the debian menu)
> > 
> > Last time I checked fluxbox and awesome where both debian menu only as
> > well.
> 
> instead of letting the tail wag the dog then with menu2desktop, wouldn't
> it be better to cater to these WM's/DE's by providing a desktop2menu?
> Still would feel like adding more layers where they should be removed
> though...

... and leave any non-English speakers without any translation support for the 
key texts which tell the user what the app behind the menu actually does? Nice. 
Lots of menu files don't even bother with an icon.

Why is it acceptable for window managers to use a menu which cannot support 
translation? Why cater to such buggy software? Effectively, these window 
managers are ignoring LC_ALL, LANGUAGE and LANG by not using a menuing system 
capable of supporting translation. Why should Debian put up with that any 
longer?

It's arguably more work to make 'menu' support translation, and then implement 
that in all packages, than for these window managers to be converted to use the 
existing desktop files. At least desktop files are available in distributions 
other than Debian.

There are a lot more translated desktop files than there are applications with 
menu files but no desktop files. As all menu files are untranslatable, any 
change to these WM's should be to require the use of desktop files on the basis 
that at least some of the title strings will already be translated in the 
desktop files.

-- 


Neil Williams
=============
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/

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