* Colin Walters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2003-29-05 18:32:22]: > On Thu, 2003-05-29 at 16:22, Josip Rodin wrote: > > > It's very nice to see that the rest of the world has been kind enough > > not to tell anything about deploying this to our menu system maintainer. :P > > http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2002/debian-devel-200207/msg00815.html > (and the long thread it spawned) > > More recently: > http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/debian-devel-200304/msg00800.html > > There's definitely more too, if you search the list archives. > > I thought there was a consensus that the menu system needed to be > replaced. Chris Lawrence was working on some conversion tools, but he's > apparently AWOL. I've been hoping he'd come back, or someone would step > up to replace him.
I'm working on implementing the desktop menu specification for the menu package (the C++ version, not the "new" debmenu). I hope to have the first version available within the next month. Because I didn't want to duplicate work, I emailed Chris Lawrence several months ago asking whether his debmenu was going anywhere, but he never replied. In implementing it, I have encountered some issues which I would appreciate input on. 1) The sections that are normally used within the Category field in a .desktop file isn't the same as with menu. Here I have decided to make menu automatically convert a category into menus system. E.g. Category: Application;WordProcessor will be changed to Apps/Editors. 2) The current menu files use a "needs" field to designate whether the application uses console or X11 (e.g. needs="text"). In our .desktop files, this field will be named X-Menu-Needs and will only be required for non-X11 applications. (so current GNOME/KDE .desktop entries won't have to be changed) 3) The current menu files has a "package" field to designate which package must be installed before the menu file will be used. In our .desktop files, this field will be named X-Menu-Package. But I'm unsure whether we should still require this field. Not requiring it might break some menu entries; but requiring it will force us to change upstreams .desktop files with the addition of X-Menu-Package. - Morten.
