Re: New menu standard

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

Guillermo S. Romero / Familia Romero wrote:
> Anyway, if people is unhappy about it, do some profiling, that way we
> will discover what wastes RAM and CPU.
There are systems that have a low limit on the total size of the environment.
I've used systems (e.g. Ultrix) with a 10K limit; SunOS 4.1 allowed a
whole megabyte i *think*, I forget.  The same space is shared with
commandline arguments, and is why you get "argument list too long"
sometimes.

>> And, why is this IPC mechanism needed?
> So there is a way to locate desktop file containers.
I don't see why you can't just look in ~/.desktop

>> I don't see how it's easier to insert into an environment variable
>> than into a file... (and is it possible to change env vars on all
>> platofrms, e.v. ones without "setenv()" in C?)
> 
> Maybe we should go back to 8.3 names too. ;]
There are still Unix systems taht have a 14-char limit on filenames, but
I don't think those systems are running Gnome today.  Someone correct
me if I am mistaken here.


> My setenv man page says BSD4.3, dunno if it is POSIX. getenv is listed
> as SVID 3, POSIX, BSD 4.3, ISO 9899, putenv as SVID 3, POSIX, BSD 4.3.

setenv is not POSIX; POSIX has putenv that can only add to the list, not
change an existing variable.

>> And if XML is too hard to use from shell scripts, let's fix that.
> 
> How? /me wants to know how to handle XML with sh. :]

Accessing an env var isn't automatically easy either.
    MENU="<menu><title><name>Applications</title><entry>......</menu>"
    export MENU
now what are you going to do? :-)

We write a program to access XMl from teh shell, of course, e.g. with libxml.
    xmlget XPathexpression
    xmlset XPathexpression filename [file...] < newdata

If you're changing the desktop format agreed upon by KDE and Gnome, you
can also supply a new program to access it.  And if it's a general
program, we all benefit.

Lee

-- 
Liam Quin - Barefoot in Toronto - liam holoweb net - http://www.holoweb.net/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Author, Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley August 2000
Co-author: The XML Specification Guide, Wiley 1999; Mastering XML, Sybex 2001