PATCH: Menu Spec - Categories

[Frederic Crozat]

Le jeudi 07 septembre 2006 à 18:30 -0700, Bastian, Waldo a écrit :
> The menu spec currently makes some weak recommendations with regard to
> how categories are to be used. The reality however is that for an
> application to show up in the application menu it must either define its
> own submenu or use a category out of a small defined set. The menu spec
> doesn't make clear what that set is although it does provide some hints
> in the right direction. What is also missing is a requirement that
> desktop environments must continue to support this core set of
> categories. Failure to do so would result in applications no longer
> showing up in the menu which clearly can't be the intention.
> 
> The above situation is compounded by the fact that Gnome based
> implementations only place "Unallocated" entries in its menu if these
> entries list the "Application" category. The menu spec does not mention
> "Application" as category. We can either ignore this and effectively
> killing the "OnlyUnallocated" fallback, or add to the spec that all
> desktop files should include "Application" as category.

I'm sorry I can't participate more in this discussion (I'm too busy
finishing our Mandriva 2007.0 release, I should have more time in about
two weeks) but you might want to have a look at one document I wrote for
our transition to full "XDG" menu for Mandriva Linux 2007.0 where we
discovered "missing" categories, compared with our earlier menu
structure :
http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/MenuMigrationToXDG

Another thing which is missing in the current spec is some kind of
two-pass for category matching : there is no way to specify some
categories have more priority than other. For instance, as a vendor, we
might want to move some entries to another category (so we add our own
vendor category) but keep fdo category matching (maybe in another
location in the menu tree). With current category matching, menu entry
will be duplicated.

Another missing thing is a way to add a preference for category or
layout matching based on ShowOnlyIn, allowing us to ship one menu
description file with different menu order and matching for GNOME and
KDE (favoring GNOME applications when running GNOME, KDE apps when using
KDE).
-- 
Frederic Crozat <fcrozat at mandriva.com>
Mandriva