Definitions

APP

A graphical application that should be listed in the menus.

WM

A program containing a menu manager (i.e. a program that can display a menu, e.g. a windowmanager).

rule file

A python script that describes how to build the menu for a WM.

Abstract

This GLEP handles a proposal for the following two goals:

• Create a common menu layout, which would be independent of the WM. This point sound quite important for those people who use more than one WM.
• Provide a common way to add applications to the menus.

Motivation

GNOME, KDE, Fluxbox, to name only a few, have all their own ways of handling menus. There have been several requests [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] from users to streamline these menus. Furthermore there are several bug reports about applications not having a menu entry [7], but since there is not standard way to create such an entry, they are just sitting around in bugzilla.

Rationale

The idea of a common menu system is not new to the Linux world, every big distribution (Debian, Mandrake, RedHat, Suse) has such a system. The big DE's, KDE and GNOME, with the help of freedesktop.org [8] are also trying to implement one standard. That will most likely happen in GNOME 2.6 and KDE 3.2 (Currently they are only implementing different versions of the desktop-entry-spec, but interpreting it in an incompatible way). But there are still many other WM's around that are not going to follow these specs in the near future. So we are trying to base our work on the specifications GNOME and KDE are going to use. (These are no official standards but evolving specifications). This has the following advantages:

• follow specified standards
• i18n support
• provide the necessary flexibility and modularity
• integrate with small changes to our ebuildtree.
• support for per system and per user menus

This system will be completely optional, nobody will be forced to use it!

Here an short overview, how it is supposed work:

1. Every APP installs a .desktop file.
2. Every WM installs a rule file.
3. There is a file which specifies the menu layout.
4. A script is run and parses all rule and .desktop files and the menu layout and creates the corresponding menus.

We also intent to include a graphical editor for the menus, but this is not the primary priority.

Specification

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=Application
Name=KWord
GenericName=Word Processing
GenericName[it]=Textverarbeitung
Categories=Application;Office;Wordprocessor
Icon=kword
Exec=/usr/kde/3.1/bin/kword

Drawbacks

A concern might be that it involves a changing a lot of ebuilds (every APP needs to be changed). There has been a proposal for another solution that generates menus from the current menu structures of GNOME/KDE. This would have the advantage of not changing the ebuilds, but the disadvantage of not being very flexible. A menu layout file or per system/users menus would not be possibly. It seems more like a quick and dirty solution. Consider that we don't have to provide massive file-updates, global lists coherent with our tree, but each capable and installed package requires a small change that goes back and forwards with versions without overhead for version bumps.

Backwards Compatibility

People who want to use the new system have to recompile all packages that use the "gentoo-menu" USE flag. This could be easily done by a tool that will parse /var/db/pkg and for all ebuilds find corresponding updates with menu info.

Since nobody is forced to use this system, there are no other backward compatibility issues, you just have to disable the "gentoo-menu" USE-Flag and you'll get the vanilla situation.

Reference Implementation

The reference implementation is nearly finished, it's written in Python, you can find it here [15] [16]. It contains a sample menu layout (/etc/menu/applications.menu), the domenu script, the update-menus script and the gentoo icon theme.

Domenu has to be included in Portage, it will install new menu entries in /usr/share/menu/applications and run the update-menus script afterwards.

Update-menus parses the menu layout file, the .desktop files and the rule files and then creates the menus. If run as user it will create menus only for that user, if run as root it will create system wide menus.

Credits

Based on suggestions from former discussions on -dev and the Debian menu-system documentation [17].

References

Copyright

This document has been placed in the public domain.