Re: GNOME Goal Proposal: Port to GMenu

[Jeremy Bicha <jbicha ubuntu com>]

On 26 April 2012 10:10, Jasper St. Pierre <jstpierre mecheye net> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 10:04 AM, Jeremy Bicha <jbicha ubuntu com> wrote:
>> On 26 April 2012 09:35, Allan Day <allanpday gmail com> wrote:
>>> On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 2:02 PM, Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net> wrote:
>>>> On Thu, 2012-04-26 at 13:55 +0100, Allan Day wrote:
>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>>
>>>>> Last release we introduced the ability for applications to define a
>>>>> GMenu (or 'application menu'). This means that applications now have a
>>>>> place to locate global application (as opposed to per window) menu
>>>>> items. Some applications have already started to use a GMenu, and
>>>>> while this is great, it has also introduced some inconsistency (since
>>>>> some app menus have several items in them and some just have Quit).
>>>>>
>>>>> It would be great if we could improve on the current situation and
>>>>> ensure that all our applications present an appropriate set of items
>>>>> in their GMenu. I've started a GNOME Goal page [1] which we can use to
>>>>> coordinate this work, if people think it's a good idea.
>>>>
>>>> I'm not sure how good an idea this is given that the use of the app menu
>>>> means that the application itself will require redesign. It would only
>>>> be really useful for smaller applications with a very limited number of
>>>> menu items, without a redesign.
>>>>
>>>
>>> If an app has a complex menu bar, I'm recommending that it just moves
>>> a small number of items to the app menu (eg. new window, preferences,
>>> help, about, quit). That way we can ensure at least some consistency
>>> and prevent those "oh, there's nothing there" moments.
>>
>> I don't know if Unity supports having both regular menus and a Gmenu
>> at the same time. Also, it's not consistent with the HIG (or much of
>> anything) to have Preferences be moved from the Edit menu. Maybe
>> Preferences could be *copied* to the app menu but that's not
>> necessarily a good idea either.
>
> As I understood it, app menus were for all app-global things. If
> Preferences is app-global,
> it should be moved into the app menu.

I believe we were talking about keeping File/Edit/View while adding a
GMenu. If so, the UI would be quite confusing if some things were
taken out of the normal File/Edit/View menus. If all we're talking
about is how Epiphany 3.4 works, then that's fine but that's not how I
read what was written.

> And I thought that desrt and Colin worked very hard to have this work
> with Ubuntu. I remember
> Colin talking about how hard this was because of integration between
> GNOME 2, GNOME 3
> and Unity.

Unity supports GMenus as a replacement for the traditional
File/Edit/View menus, but I don't think it works as an addition at
this time. No app does that yet anyway.

On 26 April 2012 10:14, Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net> wrote:
> If it doesn't, there's fallback code in GTK+. But you should really
> point that out to Unity developers. On the GNOME lists, we tend to focus
> on GNOME itself.

Of course, GNOME decisions affect Ubuntu & Unity. I'm interested in
GNOME (Shell), GNOME Fallback (not for me personally but I help to
maintain it for Ubuntu users that want it), and Unity.

Jeremy