Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo Menu - Bash vs. Python Rule files

[Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org>]

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On Wed, 2003-08-13 at 17:16, Heinrich Wendel wrote:
> They have to change to use the new menu system.

Even though ours conforms better to the current way both KDE and Gnome
do it?

> > Are you planning on changing all of the
> > ebuilds which provide any form of .desktop entries? 
> At the moment i see no other way.

That sounds like a complete fuster-cluck and a total waste of developer
time.  This means we would have to make modifications to hundreds of
ebuilds and either create source patches for packages or manually move
and modify .desktop files from ebuilds/packages which currently provide
them.  As I see it, that is a worst-case scenario and probably the most
labor-intensive way to go about it.

> > What would an
> > ebuild submitter need to do to make sure their ebuild's .desktop files
> > meet the requirements? 
> 
> I will create a validater.

I hope you plan on having it added to repoman, because I know that many
developers are not going to care and won't bother running a stand-alone
application to validate the menu entries in an ebuild.  Many people
would consider that "non-essential" behavior of a package.

> > Would there have to be anything added to the
> > ebuild to have the menus created properly, or is it done on-the-fly and
> > transparently?
> 
> take a look at portage/domenu in cvs, so a ebuild would have to add one 
> command: domenu foo.directory

Like I said, it looks like a kludge.  Would a better way of going about
it not be to generate the menus from the already existing structures in
place?  Then no modification would need to be done to an ebuild to
ensure proper menu usage.  If, say, a new Gnome app was added and it
adds its own .desktop entry to /usr/share/applications as it should,
then update-menus should detect that application and modify the menus
accordingly, rather than the developers having to modify the intended
behavior of the package to suit our needs.  If we were providing a
near-stable tree of binary packages, I could see this happening easily,
but Gentoo is too much of a moving target and quite frankly, I don't
know many developers that want to be spending a large amount of time
patching up ebuilds to make sure that they install their .desktop files
into /usr/share/menu/applications or wherever we decide they should be. 
Maybe I am just not understanding exactly hwo this is going to work
out.  Perhaps you could shed some light?

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Developer, Gentoo Linux

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