GNOME Menu Editing

[Dan Williams]

On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 09:09 -0400, Paul Vandenberg wrote:
> Well...I've never really done GUI programming. I earn my bread and
> butter doing mainframe programming. Perhaps, it is time to get my
> hands dirty and take a stab at it. How hard would it be to create a,
> "system-config-menu"? Could I use one of the other system-config tools
> as a model?

Paul,

Such an application would have wider acceptance/use than just Fedora
Core, since the menu code that Fedora Core uses will be upstream in
GNOME 2.8 (already in KDE).  Therefore, whatever application gets
written should be targetted at GNOME and not specifically Fedora Core.
In any case, it would have to be C/C++ to be accepted into upstream
GNOME (as Python, which all the other system-config-* tools are written
in, is not an accepted gnome language yet).  It wouldn't be a
particularly hard application, but there would of course be a lot of XML
manipulation involved.  Take a look at:

http://freedesktop.org/Standards/menu-spec/0.8/
http://www.gnome.org/~calum/usability/specs/menu-edit/

Even if, for the moment, the editor just edited the system menu files
and didn't touch the user-specific ones, it would be a win over what we
have now.

Dan