Re: what's going on with menus?

[Christian Neumair <chris gnome-de org>]

Am Fr, den 28.05.2004 um 18:42 Uhr +0100 schrieb Calum Benson:
> On Tue, 2004-05-25 at 20:16, Christian Neumair wrote:
> 
> > http://www.cluecoder.org/manny/calum-menu-edit3.png
> > Do you like it? Should we reintroduce the "Menus" label although there
> > is a "Main Menu" row?
> 
> Hmm, probably, it looks kind of odd as it is, and if you've scrolled the
> list far enough downwards you might not see the first row anyway.  Plus
> the label gives us the chance to add a mnemonic, which will keep Bill &
> co happy :)

OK, already changed in my tree.

> > What about renaming the applications label to
> > something more verbose like: "Applications in TestMenu #1 and TestMenu
> > #5:"? Of course, it would adapt to "All applications:" when needed.
> 
> I dunno if that's really necessary... I think this is a sufficiently
> common type of dialog now that users will know that the selection on the
> left filters what they see on the right.

OK.

> Looks pretty good to me, though-- although, like I said, this is
> probably the absolute simplest solution.  Should we consider allowing
> users to add/remove their own custom menus/items from here too, or is
> that too big a can of worms to open right now? :)

In my opinion, having all of this handled in a real clean fashion is
heavily non-trivial if you want to keep it usable. Enabling users to add
entries is odd without allowing to edit them. Allowing to edit them is
odd because if you edit a global launcher, in fact you've got to create
a local copy, exclude the global file and include the local one. All of
this would make the backend code unbearably complex. Although we already
can easily create/copy launchers through a nice API, we'll have to deal
with many edge cases and it may break many things.
Maybe we can introduce nice modifier files into the spec (i.e. a file
that only changes a particular launcher field and will be merged with
the launcher that matches a particular condition, like
ModifiesLauncher=/usr/share/applications/myapp.desktop).

regs,
 Chris