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

[Daniel Lyddy <daniell cs berkeley edu>]

Matt wrote:
> 
> 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!

I thought I quite clearly stated in my original message: "the rpms I use
come from Mandrake, and *many* of them have the following lines in their
RPM spec files."  I don't know whether English is that much different in
the UK, but here in America, "many"  is always greater than one.  I am
NOT installing and uninstalling the same RPM, and I don't see how anyone
who carefully read what I wrote could think I was doing something so
obviously silly.

> 
> | 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.

Again, it's happening after I install or uninstall ONE OF MANY RPMs that
seemingly have these pre- and post-install scripts, built to mess with
your menu.  My point is that it's a bad idea to do this, as the menus
change automagically without asking the user.

> 
> | <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...

I think perhaps you've missed the point of my message.  I don't really
mind all that much if an application "adds" itself somehow to my menu
when I install it.  What I object to is when that application alters
entries that have nothing to do with it by overwriting my entire
customized menu with some developer's idea of what the whole menu should
look like.

I *did* change my menus to be the way I want, and I *did* archive copies
of those setups.  I shouldn't have to reinstall those copies after
installing or reinstalling any one of MANY RPMs.

Dan 
-- 
Daniel Lyddy		daniell@cs.berkeley.edu
California PATH/UC Berkeley Vision Group
Richmond Field Station, Building 452
1357 S. 46th St, Richmond, CA 94804-4698
tel: +1 (510) 231-5659  fax: +1 (510) 231-5600
url: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daniell
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