icewm has no programs

[Gilboa Davara]

On Tue, 2008-05-13 at 08:02 +0800, John Summerfield wrote: (Aggregation)

> Seems to me that this approach might be quicker in users' hands - it 
> might be ready for me seven seconds sooner.


I don't doubt it.
The icewm-xdgmenu is not the ideal solution - hence, it's not installed
by default.

> 
> For users' private menus while logged in, there's FAM (File Alteration 
> Monitor) or its successor to see when you need to reread the file.

> The menu created by icewm-xdg-menu looks like it's easily extended to 
> allow an include to insert/merge a menu from users' home directory. For 
> sysadmins' sanity, I'd suggest that each include would create a submenu, 
> not replace or change any existing menu. Any includes would need to be 
> preserved over a rebuild, but that doesn't look difficult.
...
> Hopefully, the work to do it is light and educational.



Feel free to submit patches.
If they are sane, I'll be happy to include them.


> One can. Some organisations have thousands of computers, so it might 
> take some time.


I have no idea how your setup looks like.
I'm using ssh with private/public keys to propagate settings (and menus)
around my network using automated scripts.


> There's no point in accepting user input before it's ready for it, and 
> little point to storing it if it's going to be rebuilt next time.


I beg to differ.


> Menus for KDE and Gnome get updated as new packages are installed. I've 
> not explored how it's done, but it's much more convenient than logging 
> off/logging on.
...
> I don't have a problem with it sticking with its existing 
> menu/options/startup etc.
> I do think it should respect the conventions that apply in Fedora (and its relatives), and my cursory reading of RPM's triggers suggests that the triggers mechanism provides a way of keeping properly synchronised.


Again, I beg to differ.
You cannot hold IceWM, fluxbox and rest of the light WM crowed to the
same requirements as GNOME and KDE. (let alone fvwm and mwm).

As I said before, IceWM was never designed to compete with
GNOME/KDE/XFCE; By design IceWM uses easy to modify (and understand)
text configurations; If you rather not edit them yourself, IMO you are
using the wrong tool for job.

Never the less, if you have solution that yields a better of-of-the-box
experience without eating too much CPU and/or IO (Unlike, say,
icewm-gnome2), I'll be happy include them.


> Of course, when someone's logging in there might be other things 
> happening. I'm not sure that this measures the same thing. However,
> [root at potoroo ~]# time /usr/share/icewm/startup
> 
> real    0m7.565s
> user    0m7.462s
> sys     0m0.073s


First, thanks for timing icewm-xdgmenu.
7 seconds is indeed too much.

Never the less, I have no viable solution that generates up-to-date
menus without eating additional CPU/IO time.
E.g. I've considered counting the desktop files - regenerating the menus
if the count changes - but even this concept is far from ideal.
(Counting files is slow and I/O intensive; one application might be
replaced by another keeping the count constant;
etc)


> I don't like lots of computers that need individual attention. I would 
> expect that DSS and other major departments, and companies, count their 
> computers in tens of thousands, big multinationals in hundreds of 
> thousands. I expect that they lock down their staff as firmly as we lock 
> down the students. Running around giving computers individual attention 
> isn't something that scales or that they would do.


OK. May I suggest the following.
A. Create a master image under VMWare/KVM.
B. Install everything you need.
C. Generate the menus one using icewm-xdgmenu; disable it once you done.
D. Put the master's public key in the local user's home.
E. Create an image of the host and install it on N machines.
F. On the master, create a small cron based script that:
 - Regenerated the menus.
 - Propagates them to all the client machines.
G- Profit.


> There's no documentation for /usr/bin/icewm-menu-gnome2, and no 
> information on what might be good values to complete this:
> [root at potoroo ~]# /usr/bin/icewm-menu-gnome2 --help
> icewm-menu-gnome2: Usage: /usr/bin/icewm-menu-gnome2 [ --open PATH | 
> --list PATH ]
> [root at potoroo ~]# /usr/bin/icewm-menu-gnome2
> icewm-menu-gnome2: Usage: /usr/bin/icewm-menu-gnome2 [ --open PATH | 
> --list PATH ]


Point taken. Sadly enough, icewm's own documentation doesn't include
anything about using icewm-menu-gnome2.
I should write something up and add it to %doc.
In the mean time, you should add something like that [1] to your menu
file.

- Gilboa
[1] menuprog "Gnome" folder icewm-menu-gnome2 --list /usr/share/applications