Re: fmenu

On Jan 3, Robert Mibus wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-01-03 at 04:54, Carl Worth wrote:
> Programs expecting to run in GPE would be expected to include the menu
> control file; what I give out is so people can see pretty pictures :-)

This was my point. I, (for one), write programs. I don't know whether
or not people will run these programs in GPE or not. I would like to
create a single menu entry in a single format. We already have a
format for the menu entries that should work just fine, so I don't see
why we would need to create anything new.

> I saw that; However this still leaves problems - we *can* strip out
> below the second level, but then important programs (eg. rxvt) won't be
> in the menu.

No. You misunderstood me here. What I meant was that fmenu could drop
 *categories* below the first level, but preserve all menu entries:

eg. Utilities/Terminal/7 -> Utilities/"Terminal 7" or some such.

> does the format allow the specification of big icons, small icons,
> and window titles? The first we need, the second would be nice for
> a 'small' list ala one of PalmOS's options, the third we need for
> the xsingleinstance-style launching. (It would probably make
> loading the list marginally faster as it wouldn't have to read from
> multiple files).

The specification allows arbitrary name-value pairs. Everything is
done by convention, so feel free to extend things as needed. Existing
Debian packages currently use "icon=...", perhaps it would make sense
to adopt icon32=, icon16=, etc.? The menu generation step could select
the icon it prefers from those available for any particular menu entry.

> Another issue is that ATM you can copy files into RAM, have a
> /mnt/ramfs/fmenu, SIGHUP fmenu & see the new programs. If the ramdisk
> were to be emptied and fmenu had another SIGHUP, the programs would
> disappear. Can /usr/lib/menu have, say, /mnt/ramfs/menu as well?

No reason why it can't. Should be trivial to make the menu read from
multiple directories.

> I feel that it's important to allow for such things incase people have,
> say, CF cards with programs - whack it in, SIGHUP fmenu, see new menu
> entries - how cool would that be!

Exactly. And what I would like to avoid is inventing two independent
systems that largely solve the same problem.

Thanks for your time!

-Carl

> Would it be enough to grab appropriate packages from GNOME's
> /usr/share/pixmaps/* files? That's where almost all of the icons I've
> been giving out have come from.

That should be fine. The only big reason I haven't added icons to my
own packages is that there has been little impetus to do so without a
menu that would actually take advantage of them. ;-) Fortunately, that
is changing now.

Thanks for all your work.
Received on Thu Jan 3 05:45:39 2002