Re: what's going on with menus?

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Mark:

I really like the proposal.  Another feature that might be worth
considering would be to allow menu profiles, so that different types
of users could have different default menus.  A person who works
with office productivity applications might desire a different
menu than a software developer.  A person with accessibility needs
might want a menu that only shows programs that work with the
accessibility framework, etc.  This way default menus could be
set up for different types of users, rather than requiring each
individual user to set up their own menu to achieve this sort of
effect.  Just a thought.

Brian


Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> Hey,
> 	In case people are wondering what's going on with GNOME and the new
> menu spec[1] etc., here's what the plan is looking like:
>
>   1) Split out the menu spec implementation from desktop-file-utils into
>      a new module in GNOME CVS
>
>   2) Instead of a gnome-vfs module which basically does "give me the
>      menu as a hierarchy of .desktop files" it would be a simple API
>      which does "give me the menu hierarchy as a list of
>      Name/Tooltip/Icon pairs and launch an entry when I tell you"
>
>   3) Remove all traces of editing from the menu spec implementation.
>
>   4) We'd remove the applications://, preferences://, system-settings://
>      etc. URI schemes and make the panel use libmenu directly.
>
>   5) Write a simple menu editor for the panel which allows you to
>      enable/disable menu items - it would just generate a .menu file in
>      .config with a set of <Include>/<Exclude>s[2].
>
>      The idea here is that editing the layout of the menus without 
>      exposing the nature of the vfolder just creates a big mess. 
>      However, by far the most common use case is just to remove an item
>      from the menu and this can be done with a simple on/off toggle.
>
>   6) Write a more complex menu editor which would be more like the 
>      vfolder editor in Evolution - i.e. a menu editor that makes it
>      clear that each sub-menu is in fact a query against the available
>      .desktop files. This tool would be intended for sysadmins editing
>      the systemwide menu.
>
>
> 	There's only one problem here - no-one is really working on it yet. Dan
> Williams and I have been doing a bit of work on that code in
> desktop-file-utils, but we're don't (yet) have time to commit to getting
> some of the more heavy lifting done.
>
> 	What I'd really love to see is someone trying out ideas (even just
> mockups) for (5) and (6) and discussing them here ...
>
> Cheers,
> Mark.
>
> [1] - http://freedesktop.org/Standards/menu-spec
> [2] - One difficulty with this is that you there isn't any way we can
>       easily present an item that has been <Exclude>d in the systemwide
>       menu in order for the user to be able to <Inlcude> it - hmmm
>
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--

Brian