PATCH: Menu Spec - Categories

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 08 September 2006 14:30, Bastian, Waldo wrote:
> that things will work properly. One option is to make ScreenSaver a main
> category with a note that recommends the inclusion of
> "X-KDE-ScreenSaver" as well, KDE must of course be willing to (continue
> to) support that in KDE4 then.

i'd really prefer One Way of doing it so that application developers can 
target that and we can move forward and not have N different mechanisms 
within KDE4. particularly since in this case it would mean adding something 
new that would be marked as "deprecated" at the time of addition. i am 
willing to patch KDE 3.5 if it makes sense to do so, though of course that 
does nothing about historical releases.

i guess it comes down to whether or not we're targeting KDE3 with this or 
figuring that xdg screen saver support is a "for the next releases" thing.

we already have things to sort out within the .desktop files to get it to all 
work together, which between William and myself i'm sure we can do, so it's 
not particularly like the only blocker at the present time is the location of 
the .desktop files and the Categories= entries.

reading over the whole patch to the appendix again, it crystalized quite 
clearly in my mind that where there's a bit of a difference of viewpoint is 
whether applications/ is meant for, well, applications or if it is really 
meant as a dumping ground to describe all available software inc 3rd party 
contributions. the Applet category, for instance, is much like the 
ScreenSaver one to me. we don't put kicker applets in applications now, and i 
don't see that changing particularly. the only benefit i see to providing an 
Applets category in applications/ is to provide a Well Known place for those 
entries to go for third parties. which seems something of an abuse of 
applications/, but otherwise a good idea.

personally as an external developer -or- as someone designing with "making a 
great desktop" first in mind, i'd expect there to be a place to throw such 
components that weren't applications, which would allow namespacing and which 
was Well Known. where i wouldn't have to worry about Categories= which is 
suited for building visual hierarchies and networks or running into 
application entries that are using Categories= appropriately for those 
purposes, but instead have a mechanism to define the purpose of the component 
so the applications that use them can easily query for them.

it would make the menu spec more straightforward as well since it would have 
one particular purpose in mind only.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
Undulate Your Wantonness
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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