Gnome panel menus

[Ivan Gyurdiev]

> "Movie Player", "PDF Viewer", "Email", "Browser", whatever... These 
> names, although perhaps more helpful for those who are unfamiliar or 
> less familiar with Linux software, are quite meaningless for those who 
> know what app exactly they want to run. What will start when I choose 
> "Some player" or "Some viewer" thing? Worse, it changes from release to 
> release and from distro to distro... This is one of the reasons why I 
> find myself avoiding menus completely and still running everything from 
> commandline -- at least I know what I run ;-)
> 
> I like proposed naming scheme and I see it used sometimes, e.g. by Dag's 
> packages. Would be nice if it became standard naming convention.

My complaint (at least one of them) was that the suffix ("X player")
differs for every player, and that's annoying. I think one or two
suffixes should be used, and names should be sorted by suffix.

Your complaint is different - you're saying that some apps only have
suffix, and no name, and that's a bad thing. IIRC the policy decided
upon was to make the GNOME defaults have no name, and other applications
in the same category have a name. This was so that new users wouldn't be
confused, while users knowledgeable enough could go and install
something else in addition to the defaults, and be able to tell it
apart. There was a whole discussion about this, and people w/ power (not
me) decided to accept this convention. I can't remember where the
discussion was - either on bugzilla, or somewhere on gnome/freedesktop
lists.

What I find annoying is that whatever convention was accepted
is not being followed at all. I pointed out a bunch of packages with 
no suffix in my original mail, as well as how the suffix differs for no
reason. There's also one Audio Player, and one Music Player, and I
that's two apps w/out names in the same category, which is *bad*.

-- 
Ivan Gyurdiev <ivg2 at cornell.edu>
Cornell University