couple questions about menu spec

[Jordan Mantha]

It seems that Vincent Untz has recently fixed the "Application" category
bug in gnome recently [0]. It seems to be fixed in 2.19.2 anyway. Of
course that doesn't help people with older versions of Gnome though.
I'll try to work up a patch soonish and send it to the list for more
discussion, thanks.

-Jordan Mantha

[0] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=331142

Bastian, Waldo wrote:
>> If the .desktop is installed on an older Gnome system that didn't
> support > Science as a main category it would get dumped into "Other"
> 
> Yes, that was the intention of the spec, unfortunately that doesn't work
> on any of the Redhat distributions. I notice that it does work if you
> add the undocumented category "Application" so I guess it would work to
> make a Science a main category with the additional requirement that
> applications must also provide "Application" as category. Feel free to
> send a patch against
> http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/menu-spec-1.0.xml to the list
> for review.
> 
> Cheers,
> Waldo
>  
> Intel Corporation - Platform Software Engineering, UMG - Hillsboro,
> Oregon
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xdg-bounces at lists.freedesktop.org
> [mailto:xdg-bounces at lists.freedesktop.org] On Behalf Of Jordan Mantha
> Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2007 10:53 AM
> To: xdg at lists.freedesktop.org
> Subject: Re: couple questions about menu spec
> 
> I'm afraid I don't really see the problem. Right now .desktops with a
> Science category are supposed to have the Education main category as
> well. This means in Gnome the science apps show up in the Education menu
> and in KDE I believe they go into Education->Science. If Science was
> promoted to a main category in the spec then we could just drop
> Education from the list of categories. If the .desktop is installed on
> an older Gnome system that didn't support Science as a main category it
> would get dumped into "Other" and I believe a similar thing happens in
> KDE. In general however, I don't see this being that big of an issue. I
> would think that the new category would be picked up by Gnome, KDE, etc.
> fairly quickly, even before many software authors would pick up the
> changes. So to me the upgrade path is: update fd.o spec -> DEs pick up
> the change -> software authors and distros change .desktops . I suppose
> during the transition period there will surely be some small number of
> .desktop on older systems that get dumped into Other or worst-case just
> don't appear, but science apps in general haven't adopted .desktops very
> well yet so I don't really see this as a big problem.
> 
> It would seem odd to me to have a specification in which no adjustments
> can be made.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> -Jordan Mantha
> 
> Bastian, Waldo wrote:
>> The general problem with adding a main category is that on many older
>> distributions that do not support such new main category yet, desktop
>> files that use this new main category will not be shown at all.
>>
>> There is not really a good upgrade path.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Waldo
>>  
>> Intel Corporation - Platform Software Engineering, UMG - Hillsboro,
>> Oregon
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: xdg-bounces at lists.freedesktop.org
>> [mailto:xdg-bounces at lists.freedesktop.org] On Behalf Of Jordan Mantha
>> Sent: Monday, June 11, 2007 12:26 PM
>> To: xdg at lists.freedesktop.org
>> Subject: couple questions about menu spec
>>
>> Hello all,
>>
>> I've got two questions about the freedesktop.org Menu spec that'd I'd
>> love to see clarified.
>> 1) There are quite a number of scientific applications that are
>> professional tools rather than educational tools. I've been asked
> quite
>> a few times why Science isn't a main category for menus. According to
>> the spec .desktop files with Science in Categories must also have
>> Education category also. I can understand that having too many Main
>> categories could get messy, but I think there is a fairly significant
>> distinction between Science (and Mathematics for that matter)
>> applications used in education and those used for professional
> research.
>> So my question is, is there a reason Science couldn't become a main
>> category?
>>
>> 2) The menu spec glossary says that only .desktops of type Application
>> are allowed for Desktop entries. I've got several cases where adding
>> .desktops with type Link to menu structures is helpful. For instance
> in
>> educational setting, having links to websites related to the subject
>> along with the applications is great for kids. You can imagine having
>> links to the Chemistry WebBook and Wolfram's MathWorld along with
>> science and  math apps. Right now we can get around this by creating
>> .desktop files that execute a web browser with the desired URL, but I
>> think that it's not very intuitive. In Gnome, for instance, I find it
> a
>> bit inconsistent that you can have Type=Link .desktops on the desktop
>> but not in the menu. Any thoughts on feasibility?
>>
>> -Jordan Mantha
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> 
> 
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