session-prop' suggestion / App Choser? / Swallowing

[mawarkus t-online de (Matthias Warkus)]

Hi,

I am using Gnome 0.30 for quite a while now. Some packages don't
compile alright, specifically mc doesn't build its Gnome interface
since on my hybrid SuSE 5.3 system, there is only the libc5 rx.h and
the library everything is built with is glibc2 :(.
But I don't worry. I'll switch distributions when the next major
number of Debian comes out, anyway.

Now, these are my suggestions.
The session-properties thingy works allright, but there is a problem.
To add an application to the preload list, one must enter the command
line and hit RETURN. It took me some time to realise that. IMHO, there
should be at least an "Add" button next to the text field so you can
enter the command line and add it via the mouse. This would make the
applet more "intuitive", whatever that is, at least in my opinion.
YMMV.

I am also wondering of whether there should be a common interface for
chosing apps. What I am raving of is a thingy that scans your system
for executables.
A fast solution would be keeping track of changes in the locatedb and
trusting the locate command.
find could be used as a slower fallback to rescan directories where
locatedb is off (I like fallbacks).
The ACME App Choser(TM) would thus always be informed as to which apps
are available on the system. It looks them up in an ACME App
Database(TM) maintained by some poor fellow <g>, that contains a short
description and a suggestion for an icon (with a couple fallbacks,
please) for all the apps one knows of, plus some categorising info.
What is all that supposed to do? Well, for example, when you want to
have something swallowed in the panel, you click on the ACME App
Choser Button (TM), and a dialog pops at you that shows you all the
apps that would be swallowed well, with appropriate icons and short
descriptions.
Same thing with adding an app launcher button etc.

I got the idea since I often have problems remembering the commands by
which to start all the packages I just installed from the CD, and it's
difficult to keep track and remember all the cryptic names. I love my
CLI, but the ACME App Choser would be a good extension.
Perhaps the thing could in some way co-operate with the panel menu?
I see that throwing desktop files for all the Gnome apps one knows of
into the menu directory structure and showing those entries who exist
actually provides a lot of that functionality.

Anyway, I estimate at two lines at 80 characters each and, say, 5000
known apps (that's a lot I suppose :), the ACME App Database comes out
at ~780 KB. I think that's not too much. If every user wants to
configure the database, we could perhaps not give everyone his own
copy, but just let them store a kind of "context diff", i.e. his
personal entries override the corresponding entries in the systemwide
DB when it's read.

BTW, before I realised how the Gnome menu system works, I fantasised
about how I'd do such a menu system for a multi-user desktop
environment...
...and I had a vision of a dialog popping at me that said
"Xyzzy 20 beta has been added to the system-wide menu.
a) Add it to your menu at proposed position
b) Add it to your menu, customising what entry to be made and where
c) Leave it alone"
or perhaps
"Xyzzy 18.5 is in your personal menu, but has not been retrieved at
the last rescan of the applications catalog (Foo Oct 32, 3161).
a) Remove it from your menu
b) Move it to a sub-menu and take a note for a private installation in
your own home directory
c) Leave it alone
d) Complain to sysadmin".
Would that idea in any way be useful for Gnome or does your approach
already solve these kinds of problems?

Last question: how knows the right incantations to get XEyes swallowed
correctly into the panel? Does the window manager matter? So far, I
have only tried with WindowMaker.

Is there a canonical list of Gnome-aware window managers? Of course,
it would be even better if there were regular news about who
implements what :).

mawa
-- 
mailto:mawa@iname.com | ACME Frob Coil Oil ... makes bits go faster!
My site was cracked by some obscene idiots this summer. It will go up
on another server soon. 'mawaspace' on Angelfire is not mine anymore.
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