Re: [proaudio] Thoughts about menu entries and usability

[Thomas Kuther <gimpel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mi, 07.02.07 10:47 Frieder Bürzele <evermind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Thomas Kuther wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I'm currently looking at the mess in my default "Sound & Video" FDO
> > menu (E17 and XFCE here) - proaudio stuff chaotically mixed with
> > video and audio players, ripper, encoding stuuf..and the idea comes
> > up to create a nice menu, e.g.
> >
> > 	menu root
> > 	--> Sound & Video
> > 		--> Pro Audio
> > 			--> Sequencer
> > 				- Aldrin
> > 				- LMMS
> > 				- MusE
> > 			--> Sythesizers
> > 				- ZynAddSubFX
> > 				- OmSynth
> > 			--> Recording
> > 				- Ardour
> > 				- ReZound
> > 	etc etc.
> >
> > I know KDE and GNOME users can edit their menu as they like, also
> > E17 and lots of others, but e.g. XFCE 4.4 doesn't seem to provide
> > that advanced menu editing..
> >
> > So I could do this on my own... or for all in a maintainable way,
> > which means adding a package, e.g. "x11-misc/proaudio-menu"
> > something like that which adds required default menuicons and
> > generates the submenus (there are eclass funcs for "domenu" etc, so
> > that wouldn't be hard), and an eclass, let's say proaudio.eclass
> > that takes care this package is installed and provides some
> > functions.
> >
> > But what do users and devs think about this?
> >  - that sucks, mess around on your own box
> >  - good idea
> >  - i don't care
> > :)
> >
> >   
> 
> We'll thats really a good idea.
> I don't know if I get you right: You want to create a ebuild which
> generates entries for xfce4.4? from existing .desktop entries?

No, the idea was to provide a more
advanced /etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu which provides this menu
structure, but the more i looked into it, the harder it seems to do,
because that would mean a) overwriting the default one from xdg-utils,
or b) letting the user copy it to ~/.config/menus manually.

And that would work for any WM with FDO compilant menu, like XFCE and
E17.

And well, some default gtk theme icons for those submenus.

But this seems a bit hard to do in a fashionable way... overwriting the
default applications.menu is impossible with
FEATURES="collision-protect" and a very bad idea anyway, and an ebuild
just for an example applications.menu the user would have to copy over
manually would be overkill. We could post this at the wiki :P

> I've seen you've added some make_desktop to some ebuilds.
> So first we need to update any ebuild and provide a proper entry?!
> (as long as the application won't provide one itself)
> 
> hm should we abstract these make_desktop and newicon into a eclass
> function? so we needn't bother about the details?

Those functions are available from the eutils.eclass already.
But what we could do, is to keep an eye on correct FDO categories like
shown in the links I postet, like for example
"AudioVideo;Audio;Sequencer" for lmms and museseq, or 
"AudioVideo;Audio;Recorder" for ardour

That in combination with a custom ~/.config/menu/applications.menu
will provide a more clear menu. AFAIK GNOME, XFCE and E17 can use this.
KDE seems to do things a bit more advanced, FVWM as dominique said
doesn't care of FDO menus at all, hmm..


BUT as said, first there was the idea (which I posted right away
here :P), and then I started looking how things could be done, just to
see it's not sooo easy, hehe. Because this freedesktop.org menu stuff
is a bit weird..


> Greetz Frieder
> 
> 
> > Any comments on this are welcome.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Tom
> >   
>

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