Re: My Little Wish List for Gnome

[Ian Campbell <ijc25 cam ac uk>]

On Wed, 13 Jan 1999, Daniel Burrows wrote:

> > The main difference from your idea above is that the .desktop file for an
> > app is in the same place in the ~/.gnome/apps/ tree as where it appears in
> > the menu (rather than your way, where a file
> > ~/.gnome/apps/applications/emacs.desktop could cause emacs to appear in an
> > editors submenu which could be confusing)
> 
>   Ah.  I didn't explain myself very well either.  :-)  My idea was to altogether
> eliminate the directory structure in /usr/local/gnome/share/apps and
> ~/.gnome/apps.  So the emacs file would just be in ~/.gnome/apps/emacs.desktop
> with a tag in it saying "Emacs moves to editors", more or less.  I'm not
> posting an example because another message in this thread just appeared which
> was using a system almost exactly like what I was thinking of and explained
> it much better. :-)

So rather than having a tag to "move emacs to editors" it is more a tag
that specifies the location. That's much the same as having a directory
structure. To be honest on this count I am not really bother, either way
works (only thing is - with a single directory with many files it might
take longer to open a particular file than with many dirs with few files -
since I beleive the dir scan is a linear search).

[ snippage ]

>   What concerns me here is this: what happens when a new program gets added?
>   Would the menu parser still pick stuff up from the system menus, or would
> it have to be cloned to ~/.gnome?

(I've just given an answer in a previous mail - I will briefly repeat)
I had orignally thought about having the system menu still appear at the
bottom of the panel menu - so users could go into it and choose what they
wanted to add to their menu. Or else I though the panel could report any
new entries on startup.

I have made some point just a minute ago in another mail about the system
menu not really being a menu but more a repository. so I won't repeat that
here - I wait till you've read my reply to the other idea first.

Cheers,
Ian