updating menus

Russell Nelson writes:
> A7r and I had a discussion about menu updating a few days ago. Since
> having that discussion, I looked at Debian's update-menu system. It
> does pretty much what we want, although the details we agreed on
> differ from Debian's. So, my question is: do we want to be
> gratuitiously incompatible with Debian or do we want to run with what
> they designed?

I vote for the Debian style. It will make one less thing for us to
change when porting packages from Debian.

> My feeling is that Debian's stuff is lightweight enough for us to run
> with it. Any program that wants a menu entry just includes a small
> file in /usr/lib/menu. Any window manager that wants its menu updates
> includes a program to do so in /etc/menu-methods/. I'm not sure I
> agree 100% with their menu category choices, but wasn't that
> predictable?

nod. I don't think we have any reason to restrict ourselves to their
menu categories. We are a new distribution here and in a unique
environment.

Having looked closer at Debian's menu system, I don't think we want to
use the actual menu package at all. It's got a couple of large
binaries:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 273400 Mar 29 03:47 /usr/bin/update-menus
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 457368 Mar 29 03:47 /usr/sbin/install-menu

Instead, I propose sticking to the Debian syntax for files in
/usr/lib/menu. Then, a new menu package for familiar could provide a
/usr/bin/update-menus script (< 1kB) which would simply run through
and execute each WM script in /etc/menu-methods. These WM scripts
would directly read /usr/lib/menu rather than accepting the menu
definition on stdin.

That way, we avoid needing the two bloated binaries above. The cost of
this would be that we would have duplicated parsing in each WM script
in /etc/menu-methods, but in the common case, I don't expect having so
many different WMs/program launchers installed simultaneously that
this becomes significant.

Thoughts?

-Carl
Received on Thu May 24 2001 - 07:29:28 EDT