On Thu, Aug 04, 2016 at 03:16:49PM +0100, KatolaZ wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 04, 2016 at 10:05:33AM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > If I were making a general purpose menu program that might eventually
> > end up in Devuan, would you hate me if I made it depend on MongoDB?
> > Same question, but for YAML? Same question, for both?
> >
>
>
> My personal preference for dynamic things like menu composers is to
> have an easy-to-modify textual representation of the information. By
> "easy-to-modify" I mean that I would like to be able to open the file
> with vi, add a few items if needed, close the file, and have the thing
> work out what it needs to do.
>
> What they have done, for instance, to the GNOME menu system (which was
> once upon a time editable by hand and sued to work pretty well...) is
> exactly the contrary of what I consider "easy-to-modify".
>
> The format of menu files adopted in WindowMaker is *exactly* what I
> mean by easy-to-modify, and I don't see why one would need anything
> more complicated than that. After all, a menu is just a tree-like
> structure, and each element basically has three/four attributes at
> most: label, program to execute, (list-of-)keystroke(s), and possibly
> an icon.

And, please, a description of what this item is about. Given the
ncreassing disparity between program names and any kind of
ordinary-language description of what the program does, this can be
essential.

The very oldest menu systems recogised several ways of clicking on an
item:

    Do it (the default action)
    Give me a menu of actions I can do with this.
    Describe it.

Some of these have, unfortunately, fallen by the wayside in "modern"
systems.

How this is divided among single clicks, double clicks, long clicks,
hovering, and so forth is entirely a separate question.

Whether all these things are available in specific menus is also a
separate question, but the menu mechanism should at least make these
avaailable to the guy that designs the menu.

-- hendrik