Menu system for Familiar (was: [Announce] ipkg 0.9 is here)

Mark Trinidad writes:
>
> >Packages should not try to fix up things such as the PATH variable or
> >registering library directories in /etc/ld.so.conf. These issues are
> >not package specific and can be handled on a one-time basis when the
> >package installation directory is created.
>
> What would be the proper way of setting up environment settings like PATH
> or any custom one? I have a quick and dirty method of appending lines to
> /etc/profile.

My point here was simply that the PATH change should happen once when
the user decides to start using a new directory, (such as /mnt/hda),
as the package root. Individual packages should not worry about fixing
this up, they should just be setup to install to standard locations
such as /usr/bin and trust that things will work. And lots of separate
packages all munging the same file is certainly a bad model.

So, for now this is left to the user to fix, (once for each new
directory).

As a distribution, Familiar could do a couple of things to make this
easier:

        1) The default base files could have support for PATH/library
           settings for several standard root locations, (/mnt/hda,
           /usr/local, etc...)

        2) Someone could right a small package that provides a
           register-root program that would do whatever needs to be
           done to establish a new package installation destination.

> Can you give me a simple example of how the menu file should look? Any
> naming conventions or will it just process any file in /usr/lib/menu? And
> after all the above is set then all I have to call is update-menus and it
> will start processing?

It'll process every file in /usr/lib/menu. Name the file the same as
the package to avoid name clashes. Yes, all the package needs to do is
call update-menus. The postinst and postrm scripts should each have a
line that looks like this:

        if test -x /usr/bin/update-menus; then update-menus; fi

The other half of this puzzle is that programs that provide actual
menus, (such as window managers and program launchers), need to
support this system. This will be done soon.

-Carl

-- 
Carl Worth                                        
USC Information Sciences Institute                 cworth@east.isi.edu
4350 N. Fairfax Dr. #770, Arlington VA 22203	          703-812-3725