menu editing

[George]

On Tue, May 13, 2003 at 07:02:06PM +0530, Biju Chacko wrote:
> I understand the compulsions behind the spec and, frankly, I can't think
> of a better solution. :) 
> 
> I'm just wondering whether menu editing makes sense to individual users.
> From a user perspective the system menu is a definitive listing of all
> available applications. Logically then, additions and deletions to the
> menu should be reflected by the underlying OS. That is, when I remove
> 'Foo' from the menu, package foo-1.2-3.rpm is uninstalled and vice
> versa.

I also think that this would be a much better approach.  I think I argued
many times that really only very geeky people wish to modify their user
menu.  In GNOME 1 we only had a system menu and a user menu (called
favourites), and the user could only edit the user menu.

On the other hand I think that perhaps we're getting to a point where
designing a better UI then the menu system might be good.  If we stay with
the menus then I really think that editting them through the VFS is sort
of a crappy workaround and not a real solution.  It will never be perfect,
and so I think exposing the underlying menu structure in an editor may
be better.

> Currently package management doesn't really fall into the scope of menu
> editing and I am not sure this is the right time to add it. 

Should not really be that hard.  Say add a X-RPM-Package=foo, then the
menu system could present an "uninstall" button/menuitem/whatnot instead
of delete.  Then uninstalling would of course automatically remove the
underlying .desktop since that's part of the package, you notice that through
fam and remove it from the menu.

George

-- 
George <jirka at 5z.com>
   Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
                       -- Albert Einstein