[gentoo-dev] Automatic menus?

[Tom Philbrick]

Searching the mailing list archives, I see that back in April someone
asked about automatic menus. One reply said that it was already being
worked on, while others said the opposite. Is anyone currently working
on an automatic menu system for gentoo, and if so, what is its status?

I ask because I am in the process of porting the debian menu system over
to gentoo, but I realized I should stop and see if it is worth the
effort. I have the program working as far as I can tell, although I
haven't done much testing yet. It still needs a lot of work, but most of
that is tailoring it to gentoo rather than debian (rewriting
documentation, and making my hacks less of a hack). The build isn't
pretty, I see now why debian is not a source distro, but it works for
now and I'm working on cleaning it up.

For those of you that have never used debian (or mandrake, as menudrake
uses the debian menu system under the hood) you can read a good overview
of it at: http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/menu.html/index.html 
For the system to work, it would require that every package that wants
to use a menu must install a menu-method that describes how to generate
a menu for that program (these can me borrowed from debian, or written
from scratch). It also would require that every application that wanted
to be in a menu include a simple menu file that describes what the menu
entry should be. Yes that means a lot of packages would need to be
updated, but the menufiles take about 30 seconds to write, and are
simple enough for anyone to do.

So what should I do? Post a new package bug now? Wait until it is
completely done? Wait until a better time? Give up in favor of a more
mature, or better, solution?

-Tom Philbrick