automatically create menu entries

[Jeremy Messenger]

On Wed, 06 Oct 2004 13:10:41 +0200, Roman Kennke <roman at ontographics.com>  
wrote:

> Hi FreeBSD-Gnome-list,
>
> I've been using FreeBSD+Gnome for a while now and want to say first,
> that I'm very pleased with this.
>
> One thing that I am missing is menu entries for common applications like
> Mozilla, Emacs, OpenOffice and so on. I would like to have this
> configured automatically. I have some ideas how to accomplish this:
>
> 1. each application (port) is responsible for creating desktop entries
> in the /usr/X11R6/share/gnome/applications (?) directory. ok, not a very
> good solution. This could be supported by the ports system in some way.
>
> 2. someone (maybe me) starts to create (or maybe there exists) a
> database of applications with their common binary locations and .desktop
> entries for them. Then it should be easy to scan a computer for these
> apps and include the desktop entries in
> /usr/X11R6/share/gnome/applications directory
>
> 3. another cool system is Debians menu system. something similar could
> be implemented in the ports system. This again gives the ports
> developers some responsibility.
>
> Such a system would not only be good for FreeBSD/Gnome but also for
> other Freedesktop.org compliant window managers and/or OSes.

I strongly disagree with this idea of ports developers' responsibility to  
create menu. Any apps are the one that who should accept any patch that  
come with *.desktop for KDE/GNOME. It's not that hard to add those in  
their own tarballs. I didn't bother to check their bugzilla, GNATS or  
whatever, did anyone ever send to them the patch(es) related with menu  
(*.desktop) yet?

> Is there interest in such a system? Does something like this already
> exist in FreeBSD? Which approach would you like?

Only thing that I will accept is that if someone create something similar  
to fluxbox-generate_menu, but a better one than overwrite it at the each  
time.

Cheers,
Mezz

> Best regards,
> Roman


-- 
mezz7 at cox.net  -  mezz at FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD GNOME Team
http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome/  -  gnome at FreeBSD.org