Menu Spec: including files & absolute paths

[Mark McLoughlin]

Hi Waldo,

On Tue, 2005-03-15 at 16:28 +0100, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> On Wednesday 09 March 2005 14:47, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> > On Wednesday 09 March 2005 11:31, you wrote:
> > > > To solve this issue in a backwards compatible way I suggest to add an
> > > > argument to the <MergeFile> element that indicates that if the file
> > > > that contains the element is a file relative to
> > > > $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS the same file further up the search
> > > > path should be merged instead of the file that is specified in the
> > > > <MergeFile> element. I propose to call this argument "parent".
> > >
> > > 	How about just <MergeParent/> ?
> >
> > Well, yes, problem with that is that old code will not understand it all.
> > The question is of course how you would like your old code to fail: by not
> > including a parent menu at all, or by potentially including the wrong menu.
> > I think the latter will affect less people.
> >
> > > 	Whatever we call it, I think we're all agreed we need it anyway :-)
> >
> > If we can then now agree on a name we can move on :-)
> 
> Please consider the following patch to the menu-spec. I would like to hear 
> your feedback.

	Okay, I tried, but I can't think of anything much better. What bothers
me is that "parent" isn't an attribute of the tag's contents - i.e. it
completely overrides the tag's content rather than giving information
about the content. Also, <MergeFile merge_parent="false"/> makes no
sense but <MergeFile merge_parent="true"/> does make sense.

	Perhaps it would be a tiny bit nicer if it was:

<MergeFile type="parent">/etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu</MergeFile>

	because its more "I'm giving you a path, but I really want to merge the
parent - if you know better how to do that, please do so".

	Anyway, comments:

  + As someone else pointed out - do you mean to bump the version to 
    1.0? Not that the version number really means anything :-)

  + s/the/this/ might make this sentence a bit more clear:

-When the merge_parent attribute is set to "true" and the file that contains the <MergeFile> element
-When the merge_parent attribute is set to "true" and the file that contains this <MergeFile> element

  + s/the filename specified in the tag/the contents of the tag/

  + The dtd needs to be updated too.

Thanks,
Mark.