menu editing

[Mike Hearn]

> 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.

I was wondering about that.... most Windows users I know just let them
all pile up into a huge list. The effort taken to organise them is just
too great for them to be bothered with. My flatmate organises things
into neat categories in his menus, but he's an enormous geek :)

> 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.

Sure, but what better UI? One that reflects the keyword based nature of
the menu has been suggested several times, the main thing being that
Havoc wants a solution to replace the broken one now, which is fair
enough. I suppose at some point somebody will have to experiment a bit
with it.

> > 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.

We already tried this in my project by adding Action keywords to the
.desktop file, but GNOME doesn't support them :( Plus right click menus
are a bit nasty usability wise, it might not be terribly obvious how to
remove apps. The only ways around that I can think of are a Windows
style "add/remove programs" capplet or dragging apps to the wastebasket 
a la MacOS, but that needs VFS support so we're back to the start.

It's an interesting problem, that's for sure.