Re: Suggest A debian-style menu system for guix

[ng0]

Feng Shu transcribed 1.5K bytes:
> ng0 <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > tumashu transcribed 1.0K bytes:
> >> Debian menu system 
> >> (https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/menu.html/ch3.html) is a 
> >> very useful tool,
> >> is it possible develop a similar tool for guix?
> >
> > Could you explain what this exactly does?
> >
> > The manual page only documents the insides, not the description.
> 
> The below comment is from debian menu introduction.  if a package have a
> debian menu file,  all window-manager's menu in debian will show this
> package menu.
> 
> #+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
> 
> -- 
> 
> 
Thanks.

So what's the difference to existing menu-generators specific to many
or only a subset of window-managers, such as obconf?

Option 1: we could do this in scheme somehow, associated to Guix.
Option 2: we make this a choice (opt-in, run it on your own), not
an opt-out as coming up with a way where user menus are touched
is from my perspective a no-go.
I would not want some automatic generator to touch my menus which
are slightly different from just generated ones.
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