Menu Policy - please read if you maintain a package with a .desktop file in it!

[Havoc Pennington]

On Fri, 2004-05-14 at 12:55, Nils Philippsen wrote:
> - Enable people to change the menu easily, whether in place or through a
> menu editor or via the file manager needs to be discussed.

I'd say just right-click the menu button, choose "Add or Remove
Applications" or something.

> - Actually abstract the type of the application from the implementation
> where that makes sense. Would make sense for e.g. web browsers to have
> one "Web Browser" entry starting either the user's preferred or system
> default web browser, wouldn't make sense for e.g. games. Kind of
> alternatives for menu entries, but don't beat me yet ;-).

Would be kind of nice as an extension of the Preferred Applications
concept, but it's probably not worth the effort it involves - it'd be a
fair bit of engineering to make this go. And all you really gain is that
if you prefer Galeon your Galeon menu item says "Web Browser" instead of
"Galeon Web Browser"

I guess the bigger win would be to be able to change one place and
modify our default browser, if you're an admin who wants users to have a
different browser. Right now you have to modify the panel configuration
(not for the faint of heart), the Preferred Applications setting, and
also the MIME association, or so.

> - Some means for users to edit their menus
>   - Reorganizing structure (hard)
>   - Adding/Removing/Changing entries which are either generic
>     applications that only call the system or user set default or
>     specific apps

A simple "Add or Remove Applications" dialog that just lists all the
apps in the menu with a check box for whether to show it would be pretty
easy. It'd be nice to see someone write that. The app would just add
include/exclude entries to the XML file.

The GUI for structure rearrangement is a lot more work, and not all that
high value for end users. Admins and geeks who want to do this (e.g. to
just kill all the subfolders and have a flat list of a few items, or
whatever) should be able to edit the text files (the new format is
fairly rational and well-documented, at least I feel it is ;-)). 

Not to discourage someone who wants to write the code for structure
rearrangement, if someone wants to try. ;-)

Havoc