Re: Suggest A debian-style menu system for guix

[William Seddon]

On 24 April 2017 at 11:28, Feng Shu <address@hidden> wrote:
> #+BEGIN_COMMENT
>  Before the advent of update-menus, when the sysadmin installed a package 
> onto a Debian system, they would need to edit various window manager config 
> files to make the new program show up on, for example, fvwm's menus. The 
> menus could easily become out of sync with what programs were actually 
> available, with some menu items that didn't work, and other programs that 
> lacked a menu entry. update-menus and Debian's menu package aim to solve this 
> problem.
>
> update-menus automatically generates menus of installed programs for window 
> managers and other menu programs. It should be run whenever a menu file or 
> menu-method file is changed. update-menus will be ran automatically when 
> Debian packages that contain menu files are installed or removed from the 
> system. Users themselves can add/delete menu items, and should then run 
> update-menus as that user, thus creating window-manager startup files that 
> are used in preference to the systemwide files.
> #+END_COMMENT
>

Don't most/all WMs use .desktop files for this sort of thing?
The .desktop files are, if I recall correctly, also used to build menus.
If this is the case then I don't fully understand the point of
Debian's update-menu, shouldn't the XDG standard be used?

There is an extra spec used for extending .desktop files for menu use:
https://specifications.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/menu-spec-latest.html