icewm has no programs

Gilboa Davara gilboad at gmail.com
Mon May 12 17:02:19 UTC 2008


On Mon, 2008-05-12 at 21:34 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Gilboa Davara wrote:
> 
> > I'm not sure that this is that-uncommon (given the target user-base of
> > IceWM - very-low-end-machines - such as my 10 y/o laptop...) - again,
> > generating the menus is a CPU and I/O intensive task.
> 
> We have timed this?

I have timed it.
On machines ranging from PII/266/256MB to 16-core-Xeon/256GB RAM...

... Needless to say, the Xeon fared much better :)

> 
> > In theory, I can install this icewm-xdgmenu by default, have it run
> > @post, and let the users regenerate the menus manually - but then I
> > would most likely get a lot of "why-isn't-program-X-in-my-menu" bug
> > reports.
> 
> Every properly packaged program (MUST in Fedora packaging guidelines) 
> would have a .desktop file and the program would show up as defined by 
> xdg spec. This is what we should support out of the box regardless of 
> the desktop environment. If the programs don't show up on the menu 
> automatically, wouldn't that indicate a packaging bug?

OK. Let me start from the beginning.
Icewm's support for desktop files is problematic.
It's far slower then normal (manual) menus and you have a lot of missing
icons/applications/etc.

In essence, icewm works best with text-based menus - mostly because it
was designed around it.

In-order to get full menus, with user-selectable icon themes, without
sacrificing performance, I used Konstantin Korikov xdg-to-icewm menu
generator. (Credit where credit is due)

You should understand that unlike GNOME/KDE/XFCE Icewm is essentially a
text-file driven WM.

Menus, toolbars, WM options, startup scripts are all text based.

IMHO, having an opt-in automated menu generation system is -big- plus.

Never the less, maybe I should do some documentation and drop a README
file in %docs.

> 
> > It would have been nice if I had an apt-like "suggest" feature built
> > into yum/rpm/etc.
> 
> Suggest is probably going to rpm.org upstream soon and has been patched 
> by various distros for a while now. However it can be a pain for 
> automated installations (do you install soft deps or not?), QA (test 
> with and without the optional dependencies) and should be used very 
> carefully.

I know.
... But it will give me the option, at least in interactive modes, to
offer xdgmenu support.

> 
> Rahul
> 

- Gilboa




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