Re: [gentoo-dev] Automatic menus?

[Tom Philbrick]

On Thu, Jul 25, 2002 at 04:52:43PM -0500, Jon Nelson wrote:
> I agree, but think that the menu system (assuming that someday
> there is one) will be "activated" by installing menu (or
> gentoo-menu or whatever), and that individual ebuilds will still
> "install" their little 100 byte description files and so on, but
> that nothing will happen unless you install the menu program.
>
> The way it worked in Debian was like that. Don't want menus?
> Don't install menu. After 9 years of running 'stable' and you
> *suddenly* have a burning need for menus?  install menu. Tada!

In a discussion in the forums many people said they thought a USE menu
variable would be a good idea, but I guess that would take a recompile
of world to _suddenly_ turn on menus. 

> Note that menu (at least in Debian) is also capable of dealing
> with per-user menu entries.

The system is very flexible. As well as per-user menu entries, it can
turn off menus for certain WMs, for example if an admin thought the KDE
menus were adequate, but wanted generated menus for WindowMaker. Admins
can give "hints" that help shape the way the menu hierarchy is
generated as well.

> After looking at the code, it may be worth doing one of the
> following:
>
> a) taking the code as-is and just packaging it up (this has been
> done, but not committed to CVS)
> b) taking the code and modifying it for Gentoo
> c) learning from the code and re-implementing in Python (avoids
> problems with g++, g++3.x, and so on)
>
> I'm in favor of (a) or (b) (they are really the same) in the
> short term, and (c) in the long term, but am not passionate
> about any of it, really.

I pretty much agree, but someone else can have the joy of re-implementing
it in Python. I see no reason that if someone does decide to do it, that
they could not co-exist and let users decide which to install.