Start menu shortcuts

[Yaakov (Cygwin/X)]

On 02/09/2009 14:59, Charles Wilson wrote:
> IMO, each (X) package should, in its own postinstall script, create the
> start menu shortcut it needs, using mkshortcut from cygutils.

Well, perhaps GUI X packages.  A lot of the X.Org apps are diagnostical 
in nature and hence are designed to be run from the command line.  There 
are a few which provide real functionality (nothing that isn't available 
elsewhere with a modern GUI), and even those don't show up in the 
standard X11 desktop menus.

> 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.

If you are referring to /usr/share/applications/*.desktop used by 
GNOME/KDE/Xfce/LXDE, those files are shipped by each package and are 
part of the tarball, not created by postinstall.  For those GUI packages 
which don't ship a .desktop menu, one can be created by calling 
make_desktop_entry() in src_install().

> I believe Yaakov's ideas revolve around automating this with certain
> primitives to be invoked within .cygport packaging scripts.

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.

My grand idea would be for XWin itself to implement the desktop menu, 
parsing /usr/share/applications/ on startup, and generating a menu 
structure that could be used in .XWinrc as so:

menu root {
   "Reload .XWinrc"  RELOAD
   "Applications"  LAUNCHER
   SEPARATOR
}
ROOTMENU root

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).

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.

If that is not plausible, then I suppose the fallback would be to have 
cygport handle this by parsing the .desktop file, generating a 
postinstall mkshortcut command, and creating an .ICO from the 
corresponding PNG/SVG with ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick/Netpbm/etc.  The 
major drawback of this approach is in the case of split-packages, as 
this would require some special handling of the postinstall, as well as 
changes to each subpackage's .list file or _CONTENTS variable.

> How to manange the transition, from the monolithic X-start-menu-icons
> package and script, to this distributed approach -- no idea.

Either way, the transition means obsoleting X-start-menu-icons by 
causing it to be uninstalled through "upgrading" it to an empty tarball.


Yaakov
Cygwin/X
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