Re: [gentoo-dev] Automatic menus?

[Jon Nelson <jnelson@jamponi.net>]

On Thu, 25 Jul 2002 14:15:34 -0700 (PDT)
James Gibson <twistedhammer@subdimension.com> wrote:

> I normally don't get involved in 'discussions' like this, but I
> will this time. I, personally, have no opinion on the menus
> issue, but I would like to address your comment about
> conviences..
> 
> I believe that a large number of people don't object so much to
> new features that 'go against their view', as they do to
> _having to turn them off!!_ You want menus? By all means,
> implement it, but don't make me have to turn it off if I don't
> like it; Make it so that if I don't like it, I just don't
> enable it. 
> 
> adding new conviences that are on by default is exactly like
> opt-out spam; Just say No!!

I agree, but think that the menu system (assuming that someday
there is one) will be "activated" by installing menu (or
gentoo-menu or whatever), and that individual ebuilds will still
"install" their little 100 byte description files and so on, but
that nothing will happen unless you install the menu program.

The way it worked in Debian was like that. Don't want menus?
Don't install menu. After 9 years of running 'stable' and you
*suddenly* have a burning need for menus?  install menu. Tada!

Note that menu (at least in Debian) is also capable of dealing
with per-user menu entries.

After looking at the code, it may be worth doing one of the
following:

a) taking the code as-is and just packaging it up (this has been
done, but not committed to CVS)
b) taking the code and modifying it for Gentoo
c) learning from the code and re-implementing in Python (avoids
problems with g++, g++3.x, and so on)

I'm in favor of (a) or (b) (they are really the same) in the
short term, and (c) in the long term, but am not passionate
about any of it, really.

-- 
Jon Nelson
Just because it's not broken doesn't mean we can't take it apart.