Start menu shortcuts

[Jon TURNEY]

On 02/09/2009 20:59, Charles Wilson wrote:
> Jon TURNEY wrote:
>> I'm not sure what to do about X-start-menu-icons.
>>
>> I think Yaakov has some ideas about how to approach this, but I don't
>> know what they are.
>>
>> Anyhow, this is something I am willing to spend a bit of time on, if
>> there was some vague consensus as to the direction we should be heading in.
>
> IMO, each (X) package should, in its own postinstall script, create the
> start menu shortcut it needs, using mkshortcut from cygutils.  That
> postinstall script should also invoke whatever tool is necessary and
> supported to add its opendesktop menu items to the cygwin area, so that
> cygwin/gnome and/or cygwin/kde window managers are happy -- at the
> package maintainer's discretion.   I believe Yaakov's ideas revolve
> around automating this with certain primitives to be invoked within
> .cygport packaging scripts.

There are some details in how mkshortcut is called which can be usefully 
abstracted, I think.

Anyhow, I've done at bit of work to fix some of the immediate problems at 
http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=10755

On 06/09/2009 08:42, Yaakov (Cygwin/X) wrote:
 > That was my original train of thought. But as there already exists a
 > cross-desktop menu system in the X11 world, I would rather find a way to
 > use that instead, rather than maintaining a second menu system just for
 > Cygwin.
[...]
 > OTOH, someone would have to write this parser -- we probably can't use
 > any of the existing ones, since most of them have dependencies beyond
 > those of XWin, and are under licenses which are more restrictive than
 > MIT/X11. And as a Windows app, XWin knows only about .ICO icons, so
 > supporting the PNG/SVG icons typically used in FD.o menus would be more
 > work.

Perhaps this doesn't really need to be built into XWin?  There's no reason why 
some kind of (xdg menu-spec/desktop-entry spec) launcher tool couldn't be 
started from the Xwin traymenu (which might be turned off) or a start menu 
link (which, for better or worse, might well be where people look for programs 
to run :-)

Of course, you are quite right and plenty of these already exist.  It would 
just need to work in a slightly different way to the traditional pop-up menu 
launcher.

 > The attached script provides an example of what such a menu would look
 > like in XWin if done manually. I just put this together, so it's a bit
 > rough, but it should give you an idea of the result (but obviously not
 > the implementation).

Clever.  If we had some form of 'include' directive in Xwinrc (I though there 
was one already, but apparently not), that could be used to suck in the output 
of a script like that...