Bug and discussion about ubuntu menu

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

I read what you explained in the bug report, and here are a few remarks.
Clarifying the confusion around Preferences & Administration is IMHO a
good idea, since every base user seems to have problems with it.

Naming them "User Preferences" and "System Administration" can be nice
since it's not too hard to change. Though, notice that the parent menu
is already named "System", so let's not end up with jokes like Start ->
Stop in Windows. If in "System" you have "System Administration" and
"User Preferences", this means that "User Preferences" is not a system
setting, and thus should not be there in the menu. This can look like a
detail, but IMHO it's important that we think of consistency. These
strings are also very long, and may not look nice. Maybe you could
simply rename them to "User Preferences" and "Administration", the
latter makes it quite clear that we're dealing with "hard"
configuration. Here I don't have a real solution, just some advice. ;-)

Please also take care of not doing this change alone - you're aware of
that since you asked the list. This should be discussed with GNOME,
since they have the same issue. Moreover, PolicyKit is going to add many
changes in this domain, and maybe the distinction system-wide/user-only
will disappear soon. This will be a real problem while we are migrating,
and I'm glad you're caring about this now. Maybe the best solution would
be a single Control Center, which already exists. So please see this in
a long-term outlook, changes are likely to happen in the newt months.

About renaming the configuration items to emphasize ("Set" and
"Modify")/("Manage", "System", "Global"), please don't do this! I just
managed to remove every piece of unneeded text there, and these
expressions are really useless: if the menu description is clear enough,
you know what you want to do, and you're just looking for the domain
(printing, screen...) you want to configure. Everything else is bloating
the menu - and will ask much work that cannot be unified in one package.

And a detail: why do you make a so large list of packages to be
affected? gnome-menu should be (almost) the only one.


Just some (long) thoughts - good luck, it's not an easy issue