[Hamara-devel] Fwd: [CTTE #741573] Debian Menu System

[shirish]

Interesting, this should actually make menus more pleasant.

I had filed bugs on similar issues and had got workarounds but now with 
this, even if they get it in stretch, would be an improvement than now.

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: [CTTE #741573] Debian Menu System
Resent-Date: Fri,  4 Sep 2015 03:34:33 +0000 (UTC)
Resent-From: debian-devel-announce at lists.debian.org
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2015 20:34:14 -0700
From: Don Armstrong <don at debian.org>
To: debian-devel-announce at lists.debian.org

The technical committee was asked in #741573 to decide an issue of
Debian technical policy regarding menu regarding the menu system.

==== RESOLUTION ====

Whereas:

    1. The Debian Policy Manual states (§9.6) that 'The Debian menu
       package provides a standard interface between packages providing
       applications and "menu programs"'. It further states that 'All
       packages that provide applications that need not be passed any
       special command line arguments for normal operations should
       register a menu entry for those applications'.

    2. All details about menu system requirement are delegated to the
       Debian Menu sub-policy and Debian Menu System manuals (the
       "Debian menu system").

    3. An external specification, the Freedesktop Desktop Entry
       Specification (the ".desktop spec"), with native support in many
       X desktop environments, has appeared since the Debian Menu
       system was developed. The .desktop spec offers a fairly strict
       super-set of Debian Menu system functionality.

    4. The .desktop specification has significant technical benefits
       for users over the Debian menu system. The .desktop
       specification works together with the freedesktop.org mime type
       and icon specifications to provide operations expected by
       desktop users from other environments, such as Mac OS X or
       Windows. As such, applications must provide a .desktop file to
       operate well in most desktop environments.

    5. The Debian Technical Committee has been asked to resolve a
       dispute between maintainers of Debian Policy over a change that

       i. incorporates the description of the FreeDesktop menu system
          and its use in Debian for listing program in desktop menus
          and associating them with media types

      ii. softens the wording on the Debian Menu system to reflect that
          in Jessie it will be neither displayed nor installed by
          default on standard Debian installations.

  Therefore:

    The Technical Committee has reviewed the underlying technical
    issues around this question and has resolved that Debian will be
    best served by migrating away from our own Debian Menu System and
    towards the common Freedesktop Desktop Entry Specification, and
    that menu information for applications should not be duplicated in
    two different formats.

    To encourage this change, we make menu files optional, ask that
    packages include .desktop files as appropriate and prohibit
    packages from providing both menu and .desktop files for the same
    application.

Using its power under §6.1.1 to decide on any matter of technical
policy, and its power under §6.1.5 to offer advice:

    1. The Technical Committee adopts the changes proposed by Charles
       Plessy in ba679bff[1].

    2. In addition to those changes, the Technical Committee resolves
       that packages providing a .desktop file shall not also provide a
       menu file for the same application.

    3. We further resolve that "menu programs" should not depend on the
       Debian Menu System and should instead rely on .desktop file
       contents for constructing a list of applications to present to
       the user.

    4. We advise the maintainers of the 'menu' package to update that
       package to reflect this increased focus on .desktop files by
       modifying the 'menu' package to use .desktop files for the
       source of menu information in addition to menu files.

    5. Discussion of the precise relationship between menu file
       section/hints values and .desktop file Categories values may be
       defined within the Debian Menu sub-policy and Debian Menu
       System.

    6. Further modifications to the menu policy are allowed using the
       normal policy modification process.

[1]: 
https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/dbnpolicy/policy.git/commit/?id=ba679bff76f5b9152f43d5bc901b9b3aad257479

==== END OF RESOLUTION ====

The technical committee would like to thank everyone who participated
in the discussion of #741573 and the patience of the Policy Editors as
the technical committee worked through this issue very slowly.

Please see http://bugs.debian.org/741573 for discussion of
this bug.




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