Re: [proaudio] Thoughts about menu entries and usability

[Thomas Kuther <gimpel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Di, 06.02.07 19:52 Dominique Michel <dominique.michel@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> Le Tue, 6 Feb 2007 15:14:55 +0100,
> Thomas Kuther <gimpel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> a écrit :
> 
> > On Di, 06.02.07 14:57 Yves Cochard <yves.cochard@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 
> > > Hi
> > > 
> > > Yeah that's a good idea!
> > > 
> > > Acutally, I use only separator to separate the seq/synth/other
> > > sound stuff...
> > > 
> > > But I don't know how it's possible to manage the entry for the
> > > apps? Will they all be here by default, wheter the apps are
> > > install or not? (and then just remove the apps which aren't
> > > installed manually by ticking in the menu editor of xfce4?)
> > 
> > No, that would be only for apps that are actually installed. Means,
> > only for apps that have a .desktop file in /usr/share/applications
> > 
> > I'm just reading about default toplevel categories:
> > http://portland.freedesktop.org/xdg-utils-1.0/xdg-desktop-menu.html
> > 
> > And about known additional categories:
> > http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/menu-spec-1.0.html#category-registry
> > 
> > So by FDO standards a menu would look like this:
> > 	Sound & Video
> > 	--> Audio
> > 		--> Sequencer
> > 		--> Mixer
> > 		--> Midi
> > 		--> Recorder
> > 		--> AudioVideoEditing
> > 
> > Those are available standard categories, I would say this is
> > even specific enough. No need for extra ebuild magic \o/
> > 
> > The ebuild writers/maintainers just have to take care that for
> > example LMMS installs the .desktop file with category
> > 	"AudioVideo;Audio;Sequencer"
> > and it should appear in the right place.
> 
> I will take a look at those files. Most wm support the freedesktop
> norm, but it is some wm as fvwm that don't support it. Debian have a
> "menu" package that take care of it for any debian supported wm. That
> implies at on debian, a dev must not only provide a .desktop file but
> also some entries for the menu software.
> 
> It will be great to make a program that will do it on gentoo. 
> -- 
> Dominique Michel
> 
> --
> N.B.: Tous les emails que je reçois sont filtrés par spamassassin
> avant de me parvenir.

There were already some attempts to do this, for example:
http://denu.sourceforge.net/

Unfortunately discontinued :(

Currently I have some sort of solution for KDE, GNOME and E17. But
that's WAY far from being a real solution, as I took 
/etc/xdg/menu/applications.menu - but that file comes from the
gnome-menus package, and against what I though, not even XFCE respects
custom changes in ~/.config/menus to this file.

I really know now why almost any WM seems to use it's own menu system,
just KDE<-->GNOME are quite compatible, and E17 works purely with fdo
specs, so it can handle GNOME and KDE menus...
And I also know now why there is no really good menu editor (that also
handles fdo categories). kmenuedit and alacarte are nice ones though.

Bah this is really weird, for now I give up on this big mess again.

Respect to debian!