Science menu revisited

[Jordan Mantha]

Hi all,

Almost a year ago I sent an email to this list asking about the 
possibility of moving "Science" to a main category in the menu spec. At 
that time I was encouraged to provide a patch for review.

I got a little (ok, a lot) preoccupied and in the mean time there has 
been a lot of discussion, especially in Debian, about what an 
appropriate Main category would be. The goal is to provide a space for 
applications currently shoved into "Education" when in fact they are not 
used for educational purposes but rather scientific, technical, or 
research purposes. I know that the Debian Science and Ubuntu science 
teams would really like to see this change. I've heard rumors that 
openSUSE and Fedora are also interested, though I haven't talked with 
them yet. Debian seems to like the idea of "Research" as the main 
category because it is broader than Science and brings out the contrast 
to Education.

Some references from Debian:
http://wiki.debian.org/ExtraMenus
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/01/msg00445.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2008/03/msg00024.html

So, I'd like to get feedback about the idea of adding "Research" as a 
main category. I'd especially like to hear from non-Debian/Ubuntu 
people. It seems to me like it would be a good idea to solve this issue 
at the freedesktop.org level so that we don't get multiple, different or 
conflicting "solutions" from each distro.

Thanks,
Jordan Mantha

Ubuntu Core Developer
Debian Maintainer