Bill Allombert writes: > On Sat, Jul 03, 2004 at 02:01:25AM +0200, Dominique Devriese wrote: >> Bill Allombert writes: >> >> > On Mon, Apr 12, 2004 at 03:24:29PM -0500, Chris Cheney wrote: >> >> There are two real bugs here that you have touched on though. >> >> 1. Debian menu has no real concept of GenericName >> >> > Debian menu do not need to. You can use a generictitle field in >> > menu file and set up menu-methods to use it. >> >> I was going to ask whether it might not be possible to mandate the >> field in the menu policy, but after looking into the docs a bit, I >> guess I need to first ask whether it wouldn't be a good idea to >> mandate some (minimal) things the menu files need to contain ?
> The documentation is clear about that: > <p> The fields <tt/needs/, <tt/section/, <tt/title/ and <tt/command/ > are mandatory. Other fields are optional. Custom fields are > supported, so you can add new fields for you own purpose. Right, I must have missed that. How about adding longtitle and genericname to the mandated list ? >> > You need a $generictitle, but we already have it. longtitle() do >> > not exist and generictitle() is not needed, AFAICS. >> >> This seems very unclear to me. AIUI, you mean that we "already >> have $generictitle" because the menu program and system don't need >> any changes outside of the menu files and menu methods to support >> the extra field ? AFAICS, quite some packages do have $longtitle, >> so I think that saying that it doesn't exist is a bit strange. And >> I don't > OK this is a bit technical... > What you need is a menu _variable_ ($foo). menu variable are created > dynamically from the menu entries, so $generictitle will exist as > soon as one menu entry provide a field generictitle="". > A menu _function_ foo() is something unrelated. We have a > user-defined title() function that let user choose between short > titles and long titles in window managers, but we do not have a > longtitle() function and I dont see what a generictitle() function > would do either. title() is defined by in menu.h by either > function title()=$title or function > title()=ifelse($longtitle,$longtitle,$title) depending of user > choice. K, thanks for the explanation. >> > Add to xdg-desktop-entry-spec-apps "GenericName=" $generictitle >> >> > And start to add generictitle="A Generic title" in menu files. >> >> Yeah, this is the easy part of the job. The hard part is of course >> getting apps to provide the field. > Well, yes. If we'd add this to the policy and write a lintian check for it ( or change the current menu file checks, if present ), that would help... >> >> similiar to that. I look forward to the time when Debian will >> >> convert to the freedesktop menu standards so that the >> >> integration will be much smoother. :) >> >> > LOL >> >> Hm, I'm wondering about how serious people are taking this. I >> would personally like to see Debian move ( in the long term, like >> most Debian things ) to freedesktop menu standards, because those >> have a much higher chance of being available in third party >> software. This is of course not at all urgent, and I'm not >> entirely sure it would be worth the extra effort. What do you >> think about this ? > I don't think it will happen, or even that it is a good idea. Most > upstream .desktop (outside KDE or GNOME core) are made to advertise > the software rather than trying to build a consistent menu > structure. Do you have examples of that ? Wouldn't it be the job of the people packaging the apps to fixup their .desktop files ? > I wonder if it would not be more worthwhile to keep the Debian menu > as an 'omnibus' menu, and reserve the xdg menu for the desktop > environnement. This way, the menu would provide a more consistent > desktop experience. I don't really agree with the difference between what you call "the desktop environment", and other applications with menu methods. In what way do these categories have different needs ? cheers domi
