Menu order in Spanish (and others?)

[Vincent Untz]

Hi,

On Tue, September 27, 2005 12:01, Quim Gil wrote:
> En/na Michael Moore ha escrit:
>> Just for kicks I installed Ubuntu in Spanish this time, and I noticed
>> that the Gnome menus end up in a different order. Turns out theyŕe
>> sorted alphabetically, which is probably what makes the most sense.
>
> I'd say alphabetical sort doesn't make actually any sense.  :)  It is
> too arbitrary, Imagine Nautilus, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla or any website
> sorting their navigation bars by alphabetical sort.
>
> In Catalan "System tools" may end up in the third position, being the
> second "Other", which is also a good candidate to be in the bottom of
> the list instead of the top positions.

I'm pretty sure there's a bug open about this somewhere. But I can't
find it right now.

So, the main problem here is that gnome-menus support for the layout
part of the menu spec was added after the new meny layout was created.
And the menu layout was not changed after the support was added.

Someone should edit /etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu and add some
layout there and this should easily fix this kind of problems.

Note that alphabetical order makes some sense since it's intuitive and
the user knows where to search for an item. Such a change should probably
be tried to see if it feels right before making it definitive.

> About "System tools", there is something else that it is a bit
> confusing. Why do they appear under "Applications" instead of "System"?

The "System" name is a Ubuntu patch :-) It's "Desktop" in upstream GNOME.

But "System tools" should be killed. Most items there should probably
be elsewhere (accessories, for example). There are already some patches
in Ubuntu for this too (are they going upstream, btw?).

> I'd like to discuss this but... maybe the appropriate place to do it is
> somewhere in GNOME? If any gnomer can point the right links (and some
> background about this issue that probably has been discussed) that would
> be great.

Well, the menu layout is a difficult point. You can discuss it on
xdg-list since there was some talks about a common menu layout at
some point (if my memory is good). If you're interested in the
GNOME menu layout, you can contact desktop-devel-list or open a bug
in bugzilla (see http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162009 for
a start).

Hope that helps,

Vincent

-- 
Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.