Re: [Patch] apps-menu filtering

[Matthew <matth love gmail com>]

On 9/13/2010 6:06 PM, Teika Kazura wrote:
> Thanks a lot, Matthew, you're really great at exposition as well,
> still I'd like to ask a few questions.

> Does filtering come after association&  splitting? IMHO it doesn't
> sound natural, but if you say "believe me", then it must be true.

Yes, this is a change from the previous behavior.  The main reason for 
the change was for easier access to the category variable from 
filtering.  During the split a new key is create called 'Category' which 
holds one of the possibly many categories from the desktop entry, this 
is the value used in creating the menu, so it can be accessed/changed 
etc from a user-filter easily and with less confusion than having to 
change a semi-colon separated list of categories to use.  Some other 
things had to be changed in order to accomidate this, notably all 
desktop entries after the split are assumed to be inside a list now, 
though this is invisible to the user making filters, as it will loop 
through all the split entries.

> > If 'apps-menu-associate-categories is set to nil (it is 't by default)
> > then none of the entries will be associated with the master category
> > list.
>
> Does "master" mean classification provided by Sawfish, and otherwise spec
> in *.desktop as-is is used, right?

Yes, 'master' is the list of categories provided by Sawfish, combining 
many sub-categories into more general ones, otherwise it will use 
whatever is mentioned in the 'Categories' key from the desktop entry 
verbatum (which creates many more categories).

> > Honoring items such as 'NoDisplay' 'Hidden' 'OnlyShowIn' etc. are now
> > set up as 'filters'.
>
> If my understanding is correct,
> 1. If a filter returns something, then it's a "transformed item".
> 2. If nil, then "the item is filtered out". This is what bundled
>     filters do.

Yes, this is correct.  Each of the filters will either return 'nil or a 
possibly transformed entry.

> Your examples tell already almost all, but let me suggest:
> 1. "fdol" may be changed to "entry" or so. And let's clarify that
>     it corresponds to one application, or one *.desktop file.
> 2. An interested user has to look at the spec in freedesktop.org site,
>     but a simple example of "fdol" may help a lot.

I agree with both points, and adding some good docs should accommodate both.

> I think it is general enough (= flexible enough), but at the same time
> really out-of-box, so the design is already quite stable. (Superb!)
> But if you're not satisfied, we can add a notice: "This is still
> experimental, and the design may change for a while. If you're
> interested, please join to our discussion on the ML." What do you think?

Glad you like it!  I don't think the design will change much from how it 
is atm, though it is always possible.  The main change that is upcoming 
is a rework of the master category list to make the defaults better.

I like the idea of the notice as well!
Thanks for all the input!

Cheers