Debian Menus (was Re: [Announce] ipkg 0.9 is here)

> DEBIAN MENU SYSTEM SUPPORT
>
> We've mentioned before that Familiar is using the Debian menu system
> for registering packages with the system menu. What needs to be done
> by packages is is documented here:
>
> http://handhelds.org/~nelson/menu/
>
> This release of ipkg now includes an update-menus script to be called
> by package installation scripts.
>
> The last thing needed for a complete menu system is that each program
> foo that provides a menu, (ie. a window manager or program launcher),
> should provide a script named /etc/menu-methods/foo that can read the
> menu entries in /usr/lib/menu and create the appropriate menu files
> for the program. (Note that these menu-method scripts will be slightly
> different than Debian's as these will read /usr/lib/menu/* directly
> rather than accepting menu entries on stdin. Also, ipkg does not
> provide Debian's install-menu program which isn't worth its wait).
>
> I believe that the foal application launcher already has this support.

Yes, it does, but it conforms to the Debian manu system, not the Familiar
version of it, so version 0.6 requires the install-menu program to be
present.

I think not having any default support for menu parsing is a bad plan, since
it means each menu-providing application has to provide code to parse the
menu tree. When I originally started hacking support for Debian menus into
Foal, I noticed the stuff about install-menu and specifically avoided
reading the menus dynamically. At the very least, we should have a package
which programs like Foal can use, which simply provides a Python module to
parse the menu, to avoid this replication of effort.

Another issue is when to rebuild application-specific menus. Using the
Python scheme above, they can be read when the menu program runs. Using the
update-menus scheme, it is not clear when user-specific menus should be
rebuilt. Is this defined somewhere?

Cheers,

James "Wez" Weatherall

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