Re: Migration Paths for New Modules

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2006-07-19 at 11:37 -0500, Travis Watkins wrote:
> On 7/15/06, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> > Alacarte has probably the easiest job here,
> > but I want to make sure that people will get
> > Alacarte whenever they ask for a menu editor.
> > A symlink in /usr/bin is probably sufficient.
> 
> As far as I know the only place gmenu-simple-editor is exposed in the
> UI is the "Edit Menus" item in the menu applet context menu. Ubuntu
> has a patch (attached) that makes this menu item call alacarte if it's
> installed. What else would need to be done?

Binary names constitute a public interface.  Maybe we didn't
officially declare those interfaces as stable, but without
other stable interfaces to do the same thing, third-party
developers will use them.

So from the patch, it looks to me like gmenu-simple-editor
would still be installed, but Alacarte would instead be
called if it's found.

I find this very disconcerting.  Shifty interfaces like
this are a huge pain for documentation.  Some distro will
choose not to install Alacarte, and then the documentation
will be wrong for those users.  (Then again, right now we
have the converse problem with Ubuntu including Alacarte.)

Why have two programs to do the same thing?  If we like
what Alacarte is doing, why don't we just make the menu
editor we have do that?  Or why don't we just replace it
with Alacarte, either by putting it in gnome-panel, or
by making gnome-panel depend on it?

--
Shaun