Re: [gentoo-dev] Automatic menus?

[Jean-Michel Smith <jsmith@kcco.com>]

On Friday 26 July 2002 12:53 pm, Tom Philbrick wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 26, 2002 at 02:45:05PM +0200, Corvus Corax wrote:
> > Dont want to bother anyone, but the idea of having to rebuild every
> > ebuild existing for menu data seems not very effective.
>
> It would not be very effective, which is why no one, including myself,
> has suggested it. The way this would wor [sic] is, there is a program called
> update-menus that should be called in the ebuild of any program that
> installs a menufile.

It is a tough call where to draw the line of responsiblity.  Do you make 
ebuild maintainers do the work in their ebuild, in which case only those 
whose maintainers have any interest in such a feature will use the feature, 
and the rest will be left out anyway, or do you have an ebuild that maintains 
such files for all the rest of the ebuilds, that a person who is interested 
in the feature can maintain across a bunch of packages (e.g. 
update-menu-configs)?

I think the best solution is one that allows ebuild maintainers to add the 
information for their ebuild if they wish, but also allows other interested 
parties to add information for ebuilds whose maintainers do not have the time 
or interest to maintain that sort of information themselves.

Soemthing like:

#1 an optional ebuild that installs the auto-menu system
#2 an ebuild containing menu information/config info for a plethora of ebuilds 
out there.
#3 a documented means by which individual ebuilds can overlay/override the 
config file in #2 above, or an easy way for ebuild maintainers to submit 
changes/updates to #2 above.

In any event, as long as the feature is optional and not required I have no 
problem with it, though I'm not certain I would use it (I might, though.  I 
was ambivelent with Debian's menu system ... sometimes I liked it, sometimes 
I found it overly convoluted and annoying).

Jean.