George Bonser wrote:
> I sangged the below from the Caldera mailing list. It describes a method
> that Red Hat has come up with so that packages can add themselves to the
> menus of different window managers when the package is installed. It is
> GPLed and looks like a good idea.
Debian already has the excellent menu package, that does just this. It's
been around for over a year now, and about 275 packages in unstable
currently use it.
> The basic concept is that each package contains config files that
> live in /etc/X11/wmconfig that define the menu entry in a generic
> way. The user can also override those entries in their home directory
> (~/.wmconfig).
Check, menu is the same. (though the files go in /usr/lib/menu, /etc/menu,
and ~/.menu/)
> There is then an app called 'wmconfig' that processes the information
> in all those files into window manager specific menu entries (it
> is a C program that is architected to be modular in nature...it can
> currently handle fvwm2, afterstep, and mwm style output).
Ah, I think menu is better here. Menu implements a specialized programming
language. You write a config file in this language, which makes it output
config files for a window manager. This is more easily modified by the
end-user, becuase you don't have to recompile anything.
> have to use some help to get that data into a config file...in RH
> we use fvwm2's m4 pre-processing to do it. You could hack any WM
> pretty easily to support this.
Debian's menu package is already supported by:
pdmenu (not even a window manager, just a menu program)
afterstep
dwww (not a window manager either)
fvwm2
fvwm95
gnome
icewm
kde
olvwm
olwm
wm2
wmaker
> The key is that the data is generic and should be easy to deal with
> by another external program.
I'd be interested to know what data format they use. Debian's menu package
is designed to use an extensible format, composed of key and value pairs.
So you can very easily add new fields if you need them.
--
see shy jo
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