Packaging guidelines related to .desktop files

[Donnie Berkholz]

On 15:55 Mon 31 Mar     , Matthew Rosewarne wrote:
> On Thursday 20 March 2008, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > Can other distributions post their own guidelines and policies so that
> > we can look at consolidating the common parts?
> 
> Before FreeDesktop, Portland, and desktop-entry-spec, Debian ran into problems 
> with handling the various menus used by the many WM's, desktops, etc.  The 
> solution they came up with would ultimately become the "Debian Menu System".  
> 
> Packages for applications would install a file containing a list of menu 
> entries with some basic metadata into /usr/share/menu/.  Packages for WMs and 
> such would install a menu-generation script into /etc/menu-methods.  
> The "update-menus" command would use the menu-methods scripts to generate 
> each type of menu from the files in /usr/share/menu/.  This solved the 
> problem of different WMs, such as fluxbox or FVWM, each using its own 
> incompatible menu system.
> 
> At some point the "menu-xdg" package was created, which contained 
> an /etc/menu-methods generator script for the FreeDesktop 
> menu-spec, desktop-entry-spec, and basedir-spec.

I'm confused about what the final point is here. Are you recommending 
that other distros adopt the Debian system, saying it's old and 
everyone, Debian included, should use fd.o specs, just informing us of 
another option, or what?

Thanks,
Donnie