Chris Lawrence <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > - The new menu package will include a facility (like the existing menu > package does) to build menu hierarchies. The new menu package is > aware of Debian extensions (X-Debian-TryPackage; Group) and allows > expressing categorization (mapping Categories and Group keywords to > a hierarchical menu) more flexibly than the XML vFolder format. > This facility can be used by any window manager, desktop manager > (existing menu entries are used to declare the list of available > session managers; this will need to be supported), help manager (our > menu entries are used by dwww too), or anything else that wants to > show a menu of installed programs and help files (a launcher applet, > an application's "Debian Menu", whatever). >
Not sure you are doing this, but it causes problems to use a different format as the primary distribution format, and as the native format for the desktops. Among those problems are that menu editing gets more confusing (or breaks), and that you have to write more Debian<->desktop glue, more Debian-specific docs, and maintain all of it. The vfolder spec is NOT nailed down. In fact a proposal for a fairly large revision was posted yesterday or the day before to xdg-list, by one of the WINE guys. And KDE is still largely silent on what they think we should do in this area. I believe whatever gets agreed on for GNOME/KDE common format is likely to be proposed for LSB. (And I have to say, if there is a GNOME/KDE common format, using some different setup for Debian seems kind of dubious.) So short version of my comment, if vfolder doesn't work for you, you need to be posting to xdg-list and keeping the menu discussion there moving forward, not cooking up Yet Another Menu System In Isolation. If we can get GNOME, KDE, Red Hat, Debian all using the same system out-of-the-box that'll be a solid de facto standard and clean up this mess once and for all. To help out with implementation: see my desktop-file-utils package (http://www.freedesktop.org/software/) for desktop-menu-tool, which can currently generate an old-style tree of desktop files from vfolders. If people want to make it generate other kinds of things from vfolders, I'd take the patches. And as we change the vfolder spec or decide on a different menu spec, I plan to keep desktop-menu-tool in sync. So a good way to say implement "standard menu system to WindowMaker" or whatever would be to add a desktop-menu-tool output mode. Havoc
