Re: Gnome panel and configuration system

[Antonio Campos <acampos ceronet com>]

Colin Fox wrote:

> Antonio Campos wrote:
> >
> > I was thinking the other day how to minimize some efforts that are being
> > put in gnome and linux in general, and I came to some ideas I want to share.
> >
> > Why have a menu editor in the panel? I think the correct way to go is
> > letting gmc make a lot of the hard work for the applications. I mean
> > that the menues should be only entries in a directory, and the submenues
> > or icons only have to be directories or applications links into these
> > directories (the way Microsoft does it with Windows). So, when an user
> > wants to add or delete a menu entry, the only thing to need to do is to
> > edit he directory structure through gmc. If you want to modify the
> > menues, simply start gmc into the directory that holds the menues
> > structure (example: .gnome/panel/menues).
> > That way, the menu editor application simply doesn't need to exist, all
> > the work is done by gmc.
>
> Well, actually I think you'll find that it IS a directory structure. I
> often edit it by hand myself.
>
> Take a look in /usr/local/share/gnome/apps . This is where all of mine
> are (I suppose the RPM release versions and tarball development version
> go into slightly different directories - The dev versions use local,
> right?).
>
> But as for user editing, I think it's *much* easier to fire up a config
> panel and select "Screensaver" or whatever than it is to try and figure
> out which directory it would be in. Especially for a newbie. A UNIX user
> would know to do something like "find /usr/local -type f -exec grep -li
> screensaver {} \;" but that's not very obvious to the beginner.
>
> --
> Colin Fox
> cfox@telus.net
> http://overkill.starnetc.com/~cfox
>
> --
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> as the Subject.

The first thing is that gnome panel applications should reside on the directory
of every user (example: /home/whoever/.gnome/apps). The installation of this
files should be done the first time the user starts a gnome-session. And gnome
should get the data from the global definition /usr/share/gnome/apps.
As you can see, with your model, only root can modify /usr/share/gnome/apps,
because only root has access to that directory.
I mean, the corret behaviour when you edit the menues is to fire up gmc on the
correct user directory (/home/whoever/.gnome/apps), that way you don't need to
use a menu editor... (gmc should do the work).