Re: Who keeps messing with my Menu drawer???

[Matt <madmatt bits bris ac uk>]

Daniel Lyddy wrote:

| Daniel Lyddy wrote:
| >
| > Some process or script keeps coming by roughly once a day and
| > overwriting my menu with some ugly default.  I don't know whether it's
| > something in GNOME itself or whether it's something installed with the
| > distro (Mandrake 7.1).  Either way, it's Redmond-like behavior at its
| > worst and it has no place in the Open Source movement.
| 
| I have finally figured out the culprit, quite by accident.  The rpms I
| use come from Mandrake, and many of them have the following lines in
| their RPM spec files:
| 
| %post
| %{update_menus}
| 
| %postun
| %{clean_menus}

This is only ever going to run when you initially install the software.
Once the software is installed, you are free to customise the layout to
suit you. If you are constantly installing and uninstalling the same RPM,
I'm not surprised it's changing the menus!

| For those of you not familiar, I believe that if the RPM in question is
| being installed, the {update_menus} command is run as a last step; and
| it's {clean_menus} that is run when the RPM in question is being
| un-installed.  To solve my immediate problem, I need to somehow convince
| rpm to ignore these commands, as it would be way too tedious to go
| through every SRPM in the world and erase them.

These commands are there to set up your chosen RPM with a default
configuration that *should* be usable in most situations. If you don't
like these defaults, you're free to change them, as you've no doubt done.
The symptoms you're describing, if it happens every day, sounds like a
crontab entry somewhere is doing the business, not an RPM install script.

| <soapbox mode ON>
| This is Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris/whatever.  You're not supposed to change
| the look and feel of my desktop without my explicit permission.  What
| are we, Microsoft?  
| <soapbox mode OFF>

I think perhaps you've missed the point of these scripts. They're there to
be run after the binaries are (un)installed to initialise the state of the
system. The example you site, after a package is installed for example,
it adds the package to the menu, so when the average user starts X up
again, they can see their nice new package, instead of having to search
for it. Another example would be if you've just installed an RPM that
installs a load of libraries, the post-install script would almost
definetly run ldconfig. Just think of the average person trying to work
out why the system can't find the new libs if that didn't happen...

If you want apps installed in a non-default manner, and you obviously feel
strongly on the subject, try getting the source tarballs.

Another tip would be, install all your packages and save the menu state,
then on your other machines install the software and *then* copy your menu
over.

Just my 2p

Matt