Re: My Little Wish List for Gnome

[Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows brown edu>]

On Wed, Jan 13, 1999 at 03:38:28PM +0000, Ian Campbell was heard to say:
> [ snip - my idea - badly explained ;-) ]

  Sorry. :-)

> >   Would you mind repeating this after your exams? :-)  I didn't quite follow
> > it..
> > 
> 
> I was in a hurry, sorry. But my exam is finished now (it was ok, thanks),
> I will try to explain it better now.... 
> 
> your idea is similar to mine, but not quite... 
> 
> what I was suggesting is that there was no system menu at all (in the
> sense of it being a menu), but rather a place where all the system default
> .desktop files live. The panel menu can then be generated from the user's
> ~/.gnome/apps/*.desktop files and not from a combination of the two menus
> at all. Each desktop file in the user menu could if desired contain a
> defaults= tag which points to the .desktop file in the system menu, other
> tags could then overide these settings for that user etc.

  Ok.  That seems like a fairly reasonable idea..

> The main difference from your idea above is that the .desktop file for an
> app is in the same place in the ~/.gnome/apps/ tree as where it appears in
> the menu (rather than your way, where a file
> ~/.gnome/apps/applications/emacs.desktop could cause emacs to appear in an
> editors submenu which could be confusing)

  Ah.  I didn't explain myself very well either.  :-)  My idea was to altogether
eliminate the directory structure in /usr/local/gnome/share/apps and
~/.gnome/apps.  So the emacs file would just be in ~/.gnome/apps/emacs.desktop
with a tag in it saying "Emacs moves to editors", more or less.  I'm not
posting an example because another message in this thread just appeared which
was using a system almost exactly like what I was thinking of and explained
it much better. :-)

> for example, the system menu might look like this, where each .desktop
> file contains the settings for the app in question
> 
> ${prefix}/share/apps/applications/
>                                  /emacs.desktop
>                                  /netscape.desktop 
>                     /utilities/
>                               /calc.desktop
>                               /xterm.desktop
>                     /system/
>                            /gmenu.desktop
> 
> now, the first time someone logs in they get a menu setup automagically in
> ~/.gnome/apps that is the same structure as above, except each .desktop
> file would simply contain something along the lines of (for emacs):

  [ the rest of the explanation snipped ]

  What concerns me here is this: what happens when a new program gets added?
  Would the menu parser still pick stuff up from the system menus, or would
it have to be cloned to ~/.gnome?

> This seems more intuitive than leaving emacs.desktop in applications
> directory with a tag saying that is really in the editors menu. Imagine if
> you wanted to change the setting on emacs - you would need to remember
> that emacs.desktop was in the applications folder, even though emacs
> appears under editors in the menu. This is unlikely to be what most people
> will expect.

  Yeah.  That's not quite what I was suggesting, but I guess my idea isn't
quite as obvious either.  Hmm..


-- 
  Daniel Burrows

  Nothing is hopeless.

  PROOF:
(a) Assume the opposite.
(b) If something _is_ hopeless, then its condition can only improve.
(c) If its condition can only improve, then there must be hope for it.
(d) Therefore, nothing is hopeless.  QED.

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