Old Gnome menus not being fully recognised

[Oliver Grawert]

hi,
Am Montag, den 10.01.2005, 12:40 -0500 schrieb nuopus:
> Lots of the programs in the repositories create menu entries in the old
> style. Good examples are Pan, Tuxpaint ... and others.  Actually, the
> /usr/share/gnome/apps is being read .. it is in the definition, but
> some entries are not displayed because they have no categories. The old
> style would place categories by looking at the directory the file is in.
> I have found that you can just edit the file in there, add a categories
> line and it will work ... not need to move them to
> /usr/share/applications ... so i'm sure an attempt at backwards
> compatibility is being attempted.
sure the menusystem is backward compatible and you can store your
launchers indeed in /usr/share/gnome/apps, but there are new standards
that should get taken into account (else the development of standards
would be nonsense at all) all i wanted to point out here is that the
apps _should_ put them in tha appropriate dir nowadays.

from the xdg standard, feel free to look it up yourself on f.d.o:

$XDG_DATA_DIRS/applications/
        
        This directory contains a .desktop file for each possible menu
        item. Each directory in the $XDG_DATA_DIRS search path should be
        used (i.e. desktop entries are collected from all of them, not
        just the first one that exists). When two desktop entries have
        the same name, the one appearing earlier in the path is used. 

> The thing I don't like is a response I got from a devloper stating that
> app programs should follow the new menu specification ... and the
> maintainer of each of the packages should change to the new menu
> system. In my mind, this is a poor way to develop software that is not
> a complete rewrite of the original software .... backward compatibility
> is just a good idea. But ... it is still in development. I hope that
> developer is not speaking for the community when he essentially says
> that everyone must conform or everyone will get left behind. This is
> just ode to the Microsoft mentality.
so you dont want progress for linux on the desktop and rather have users
editing .desktop files instead of a small fix that is easily done to the
package by adding one (!) line ? thats a weird attitude towards the
users. i'd rather see all apps with the right .desktop entrys to have
them in the gnome menu (no matter where they are located as long as its
supportable) after they are installed (and i know ther is an approach to
move into this direction)....
and i really cant follow your comparison with MS here, whats wrong if
both of the big DEs in linux use the same menu system or even other non
DE related apps use it ? freedesktop is making a really big approach
here to standarize the desktop in linux and comparing them with MS for
that is quite poor.

ciao
	oli


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