Look at what the panel does now before discussing what it should do!! Re: GNOME panel "menu" applet

[George <jirka 5z com>]

Points I saw which are already solved:

1) Caching: been in the panel for ages, The panel will only stat all files in
just the current directory to find out if eny of them changed, but does not
reread anything unless it's necessary, the memory requirements for the cache
are not very large since there is not that much we need to keep track of
(just the name and the .desktop file location)

2) Reading thousands of .desktop files is slow: But the panel will NOT read
all the .desktop files, just the directory that you are about to look at,
even with a menu directory as big as the screen it's not that slow

3) gmc should be able to edit menus: it is!, the menus are directories with
files, if you want you can edit them with /bin/sh and /bin/ed if you are so
inclined, it is true that maybe gmc should be able to do more things
transparently in the menu directories

4) Menu editor sucks: No it doesn't, the menus are not quite exactly the same
as files on a disk, and just like I think that file managers shouldn't show
html pages, I think they're not the perfect tool for menu editting, a
separate menu editor can be much more powerfull, and easier to use maybe

Things that make the panel menu slow:

1) the menu widgets eat up gobs of ram so the panel dumps them after a while,
but then we are rereading the f#$^@ing icons again, if you got gobs of ram,
go and disable the dumping in the global properties, or turn off the icons
and you should get instant speed up

2) There could be some sort of polling system insted of on demand stating of
directories, and maybe stop statting directories if we have statted them in
the last couple of seconds. There is a lot of idle time when the user is
browsing the menu and it could be used for to our advantage

Other things:

1) The .desktop files NEED to be the same for both KDE and GNOME, so
everyting needs to be done thesame

2) The menus should be kept as now, simple text files in directories, this is
much much easier to deal with, it's possible to edit with file managers,
doesn't have the problems of symlinks, and doesn't have the problems of
metadata, etc...

George