Re: [gentoo-dev] [PROPOSAL] Menu system for all gentoo wm's.

Re: [gentoo-dev] [PROPOSAL] Menu system for all gentoo wm's.

[Igor Lev]

I think this would be great especially if there is a frontend that allows you to choose the location/name of each menu item or menu directory. You can have the defaults come in the ebuilds and then allow the user to change it either by hand or through a fronted program to keep the syntax intact. As long as there is both freedom in changing the default layout of the menus, choosing which packages we want in the menus and in choosing whether to go with this system at all I think this would be a great idea. 

-Igor
-------Original Message-------
From: Svyatogor <svyatogor@gentoo.org>
Sent: 05/29/03 02:08 PM
To: gentoo-dev@gentoo.org
Subject: [gentoo-dev] [PROPOSAL] Menu system for all gentoo wm's.

> 
> Hello Folks!
I have recently been thinking on implementing the menu system for gentoo,
something like what we have in mandrake (I guess it came from debian).
At the moment when a user installs a new app he needs to figure out what
is
the name of the binary he needs and then add it to the menu of his window
manager(s). This is done automatically only if you're installing an app
for
your desktop (i.e. gnome apps on gnome, kde apps on kde).
The whole idea is make thins process automatic - the user installs a
programm
foo, log out back in and sees the menu entry in all window managers.

Here is my suggestion on who it should work.
On the system we have a central location for the menu, say /etc/menu.d/
Here all subfolders represent categories and files - menu entries
respectively. The file contains three entries, something like this:

Name=MyApp
Command=/usr/bin/myapp
Icon=icon.png

These entries are created when a pckage is merged by a special domenu
command
in a ebuild. E.g. domenu Editors, GVim, gvim
In addition to the categories folder the menu.d/ would contain a folder
"rules", which has the ebuild style files describing how the menus for
each
installed wm/de should be generated. It would look like this:

init_menu() {
#Do all nessecary init. here. Eg. touch the menu file.
}

start_menu() {
#Wright whatever should be in heading of the menu.
#Especially important for one file menus file fluxbox.
}

write_entry() {
#Ovious. Here we have ${Cat} ${Name} ${Com} vars defined and set.
}

end_menu() {
#whatever should be done to finish the menu.
}

Now the most important step: genrating users menu. First of all a user
should
have a choice of whether to use this system or not. If the user likes it
he
should add a call to syncmenu (a bash scipt) to the .bash_profile or
whatever
file.

When the syncmenu starts it first of all syncronises the ~/.menu with
/etc/menu.d (It will basically sync everything except the files that have
Custom tag - means edited by user and don't touch). Then this file sources
the files in the /etc/menu.d/rules and calls the functions in the order:
init, start, write (for every entry), end.

I guess the system is quite flexible and allows to support any wm,
irrespectively of the menu style it uses. However, before starting woking
on
it I just wanted to get some feedback on the idea.

Ok, waiting for your criticism ;)

--
Sergey Kuleshov <svyatogor@gentoo.org>
Let the Force be with us!


--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

> 

--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] [PROPOSAL] Menu system for all gentoo wm's.

[Michael Cummings]

I'm a little dense...how is this different than projects like kportage,
a kde frontend to portage?

--
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Re: [gentoo-dev] [PROPOSAL] Menu system for all gentoo wm's.

[Michael Kohl]

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On Thu, 29 May 2003 12:17:52 -0400
Michael Cummings <mcummings@gentoo.org> wrote:

> I'm a little dense...how is this different than projects like
> kportage, a kde frontend to portage?

Hm, because these projects try to be graphical frontends for Portage,
while this proposal aims at a unified way of automatically creating
menus entires for all the different WMs when installing a new
application?

Michael

-- 
www.cargal.org 
GnuPG-key-ID: 0x90CA09E3
Jabber-ID: citizen428 [at] cargal [dot] org
Registered Linux User #278726


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Re: [gentoo-dev] [PROPOSAL] Menu system for all gentoo wm's.

[Michael Cummings]

And this time to the list...see? I am *dense* :) Must have misread the
original email, thought it was looking to be a front end to package
mangement in general


On Fri, May 30, 2003 at 12:21:33AM +0800, Michael Kohl wrote:
> On Thu, 29 May 2003 12:17:52 -0400
> Michael Cummings <mcummings@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
> > I'm a little dense...how is this different than projects like
> > kportage, a kde frontend to portage?
> 
> Hm, because these projects try to be graphical frontends for Portage,
> while this proposal aims at a unified way of automatically creating
> menus entires for all the different WMs when installing a new
> application?
> 
> Michael
> 
> -- 
> www.cargal.org 
> GnuPG-key-ID: 0x90CA09E3
> Jabber-ID: citizen428 [at] cargal [dot] org
> Registered Linux User #278726
> 



--
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Re: [gentoo-dev] [PROPOSAL] Menu system for all gentoo wm's.

[Jon Kent]

Hi,

Yeah I have this sorta thing on my Debian boxes.  I
can see the benefit, but for me I really did not like
the menu layout that Debian used, espcially in KDE
(very yukky), so I prefer to build my own.  As long as
this is optional (of course it it ;-) ), I think some
people may find this of use.


Jon


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Re: [gentoo-dev] [PROPOSAL] Menu system for all gentoo wm's.

[Daniel Armyr]

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Well, writing out menus on any system has allways been a drag. This system being vm-independent sppeks to its benifit. Enforcing its implementation in all ebuilds might be hard though. And I would like to have an emerge flag to disable it. Some programs just clutter the menus.

--Daniel Armyr

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [PROPOSAL] Menu system for all gentoo wm's.

[Martin, Stephen]

Jon Kent wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Yeah I have this sorta thing on my Debian boxes.  I
> can see the benefit, but for me I really did not like
> the menu layout that Debian used, espcially in KDE
> (very yukky), so I prefer to build my own.  

Isn't it in the Debian Policy Manual somewhere that KDE should be made 
as unpleasant as possible? ;)

I'm sorry, but I can't resist.

-- 
Stephen C. Martin

PGP/GnuPG key 1024D/8C4FCA5D


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Re: [gentoo-dev] [PROPOSAL] Menu system for all gentoo wm's.

[Dan Armak]

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On Thursday 29 May 2003 21:08, Svyatogor wrote:
> Ok, waiting for your criticism ;)

I've only skimmed over your proposal so far. btw I didn't see a description of 
how you'll actually make all the WMs aware of the menu. Do you want to 
autogenerate, from the central menu tree, a custom-format menu tree for every 
installed WM?

Anyway, what about the freedesktop.org standard for .desktop files? It has 
some very nice features such as multiple categories per item, 
multilpe-language descriptions, etc. More importantly, both kde and gnome 
will use that standard in their next releases (maybe gnome already does, not 
sure). So why don't we build on top of that? Other people in other distros, 
as well as the developers of various packages and of WMs other than kde and 
gnome, will surely be adding support for it in the future. Why do we want yet 
another custom system? How is it better than what freedesktop.org has (with 
perhaps portage-centric tools written to make things easier)?

-- 
Dan Armak
Gentoo Linux developer (KDE)
Matan, Israel
Public GPG key: http://cvs.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key

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[gentoo-dev] [PROPOSAL] Menu system for all gentoo wm's.

[Svyatogor]

Hello Folks!
I have recently been thinking on implementing the menu system for gentoo,
something like what we have in mandrake (I guess it came from debian).
At the moment when a user installs a new app he needs to figure out what is
the name of the binary he needs and then add it to the menu of his window
manager(s). This is done automatically only if you're installing an app for
your desktop (i.e. gnome apps on gnome, kde apps on kde).
The whole idea is make thins process automatic - the user installs a programm
foo, log out back in and sees the menu entry in all window managers.

Here is my suggestion on who it should work.
On the system we have a central location for the menu, say /etc/menu.d/
Here all subfolders represent categories and files - menu entries
respectively. The file contains three entries, something like this:

Name=MyApp
Command=/usr/bin/myapp
Icon=icon.png

These entries are created when a pckage is merged by a special domenu command
in a ebuild. E.g. domenu Editors, GVim, gvim
In addition to the categories folder the menu.d/ would contain a folder
"rules", which has the ebuild style files describing how the menus for each
installed wm/de should be generated. It would look like this:

init_menu() {
#Do all nessecary init. here. Eg. touch the menu file.
}

start_menu() {
#Wright whatever should be in heading of the menu.
#Especially important for one file menus file fluxbox.
}

write_entry() {
#Ovious. Here we have ${Cat} ${Name} ${Com} vars defined and set.
}

end_menu() {
#whatever should be done to finish the menu.
}

Now the most important step: genrating users menu. First of all a user should
have a choice of whether to use this system or not. If the user likes it he
should add a call to syncmenu (a bash scipt) to the .bash_profile or whatever
file.

When the syncmenu starts it first of all syncronises the ~/.menu with
/etc/menu.d (It will basically sync everything except the files that have
Custom tag - means edited by user and don't touch). Then this file sources
the files in the /etc/menu.d/rules and calls the functions in the order:
init, start, write (for every entry), end.

I guess the system is quite flexible and allows to support any wm,
irrespectively of the menu style it uses. However, before starting woking on
it I just wanted to get some feedback on the idea.

Ok, waiting for your criticism ;)

--
Sergey Kuleshov <svyatogor@gentoo.org>
Let the Force be with us!


--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] [PROPOSAL] Menu system for all gentoo wm's.

[Svyatogor]

> I've only skimmed over your proposal so far. btw I didn't see a description
> of how you'll actually make all the WMs aware of the menu. Do you want to
> autogenerate, from the central menu tree, a custom-format menu tree for
> every installed WM?

Exactly. The central menu tree will be quite generic and then the script will, 
based on it, generate the menus for each WM. The system will be aware of a wm 
through the .menu file in the rules direcotry, which will contain a bunch of 
sh functions to generate the proper menu for a specific wm.

>
> Anyway, what about the freedesktop.org standard for .desktop files? It has
> some very nice features such as multiple categories per item,
> multilpe-language descriptions, etc. More importantly, both kde and gnome
> will use that standard in their next releases (maybe gnome already does,
> not sure). So why don't we build on top of that? Other people in other
> distros, as well as the developers of various packages and of WMs other
> than kde and gnome, will surely be adding support for it in the future. Why
> do we want yet another custom system? How is it better than what
> freedesktop.org has (with perhaps portage-centric tools written to make
> things easier)?

I'm not really sure what you mean. But if I got it right I guess we could use 
their specification for the central menu, while it does not change the idea 
of generating wm-specific menu through the foo.menu  script. At leasr while 
99% of window managers do not support it directly :)

-- 
Sergey Kuleshov <svyatogor@gentoo.org>
Let the Force be with us!


--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] [PROPOSAL] Menu system for all gentoo wm's.

[Peter Ruskin]

On Thursday 29 May 2003 19:08, Svyatogor wrote:
> I have recently been thinking on implementing the menu system for
> gentoo, something like what we have in mandrake (I guess it came from
> debian).

Please...no.  I absolutely hated the Mandrake integrated menu.  I use 
KDE and am content with its menuing.

Peter


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Re: [gentoo-dev] [PROPOSAL] Menu system for all gentoo wm's.

[Chris Black]

On Thu, 29 May 2003 23:17:56 +0100
Peter Ruskin <aoyu93@dsl.pipex.com> wrote:

> On Thursday 29 May 2003 19:08, Svyatogor wrote:
> > I have recently been thinking on implementing the menu system for
> > gentoo, something like what we have in mandrake (I guess it came from
> > debian).
> 
> Please...no.  I absolutely hated the Mandrake integrated menu.  I use 
> KDE and am content with its menuing.
> 
> Peter

If you use the menu system from Debian it is completely optional on the user end. All it requires is menu files be included for each program that would require one. So if you don't actually emerge menu you won't ever see them.

--Chris

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [PROPOSAL] Menu system for all gentoo wm's.

[Dan Armak]

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On Friday 30 May 2003 00:58, Svyatogor wrote:
> > Anyway, what about the freedesktop.org standard for .desktop files? It
> > has some very nice features such as multiple categories per item,
> > multilpe-language descriptions, etc. More importantly, both kde and gnome
> > will use that standard in their next releases (maybe gnome already does,
> > not sure). So why don't we build on top of that? Other people in other
> > distros, as well as the developers of various packages and of WMs other
> > than kde and gnome, will surely be adding support for it in the future.
> > Why do we want yet another custom system? How is it better than what
> > freedesktop.org has (with perhaps portage-centric tools written to make
> > things easier)?
>
> I'm not really sure what you mean. But if I got it right I guess we could
> use their specification for the central menu, while it does not change the
> idea of generating wm-specific menu through the foo.menu  script. At leasr
> while 99% of window managers do not support it directly :)

Yes, that's what I meant. It's at 
http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/menu/draft/menu-spec/menu-spec.html and 
is only a draft so far, but kde and gnome already agree on it (they just 
might jointly modify it a bit in the future). It's as good in itself as any 
other proposal, I'd say, since we don't have to use all the advanced 
features...

-- 
Dan Armak
Gentoo Linux developer (KDE)
Matan, Israel
Public GPG key: http://cvs.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key

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