[Fedora-electronic-lab] Request to register a "Main" desktop Category: Electronics

[Chitlesh GOORAH]

Hello there,

This is a request to register a "Main" desktop Category: Electronics
so that it becomes a standard defined by
http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/apa.html

Name: Electronics
Description : Electronics design and simulation software, e.g. a
circuit designer
Notes: (none)

For nearly 3 years, Fedora is also striving to provide an advanced
electronic design and simulation platform for electronic hardware
development under the name of "Fedora Electronic Lab". In short we
provide opensource solutions for people to develop from IC chips to a
final product e.g openmoko smartphone.

http://chitlesh.fedorapeople.org/FEL

I'm writing you this email on behalf of all upstream projects we are
working with so that we all can deliver an unified and standard set of
guidelines for other linux distributions, not only for Fedora.

Problems we have WITHOUT this electronics main category:
* The software we are providing do not fall under "Education"
freedesktop MAIN category but fall into an advanced engineering
category not yet defined by the freedesktop standard. At the same
time, we don't want to mix software for Electronic Engineering and
Mechanical Engineering, thus category "Engineering" isn't appropriate
for a long term solution.
* An unified and standard set of guidelines for all linux
distributions and developers.
* There are a lot of electronic "design flows". Each design flow
contains various set of software. If all the software for electronic
design falls into various categories, it does not give any linux
distribution the proper credentials and value of their solutions.
Opensource solutions are there but lost inside the bag.
* No Compatibility across various desktop environments: KDE, gnome,
XFCE, LXDE,...

We are hoping that if this "Electronics" main category is approved,
packagers of various distributions and developers will add
Categories=Electronics;
to their desktop files.

In order not to drown other users into complexity, one of the gEDA
developers came up with a small package called "electronics-menu"
http://geda.seul.org/dist/electronics-menu-1.0.tar.gz
which provides a "Electronics" menu as described by the RED arrow :
http://chitlesh.fedorapeople.org/images/electronic-menu.png

Please accept the icon provided
http://geda.seul.org/dist/electronics-menu-1.0.tar.gz.

On Fedora, we have tuned our GUI electronics software's desktop files
so that they support this "Electronics" main category. I was told that
even debian is opting for this type of menu category.

As you can see on this page:
http://chitlesh.fedorapeople.org/FEL/list.html
we have quite a handful set of GUI for electronic design. That said,
other electronic solutions are also mixed and confuses  a lot of users
as they (newbies) can't distinguish the software set they need for
their respective design flow (analog, digital, mixed signal,
embedded). Hence, I've added submenu support to the
http://geda.seul.org/dist/electronics-menu-1.0.tar.gz as described by
the YELLOW arrow. However, we are still under discussion about the
proper subcategory naming. Thus please leave these additional
categories for a later discussion.
http://chitlesh.fedorapeople.org/images/electronic-menu.png

Kind regards,
Chitlesh Goorah