An menu editor

[Tuukka Mäkinen]

Jasper Huijsmans wrote:
> I don't think we're quite ready to add python as a dependency for xfce,
> yet ;-)
> 
> As far as I know no-one is working on a menu editor yet. However,
> someone (Tuukka Mäkinen <tukem at iki.fi>) is looking at how to implement
> the freedesktop menu spec for xfce 4. This work will require a menu
> editor too, eventually. I'm not sure how far along this effort is,
> probably not far enough to start thinking about a GUI.
> 
> I don't know if this helps you at all, but that's the current situation
> as far as I know ;-)
> 
> 	Jasper
> 
> 
> Op za 27-12-2003, om 14:52 schreef Jean-François Wauthy:
> 
>>I was thinking to write it in C using GTK+2... I would like to
>>collaborate on such a project but the problem is that i don't know
>>python...

I would suggest using C too. Menu editor is so important that it should 
belong to xfce core. Of cource if someone comes up with python 
menueditor for current menu xml format and doesn't mind it being made 
obsolete when freedesktop menu becomes reality that's OK too.

About directly writing freedesktop menu standard compliant menueditor... 
Freedesktop menu standard is so complex that regular use and editing 
require different kind of parsing. For one editing must keep comments 
and deleted menu entries are just marked unused not actually deleted. 
This is a real pain. That's why I would suggest that the official 
menueditor is a separate program too.

Some ideas for editor:
- Allow opening any (menu.xml) file for editing, so that admin can edit 
system level menu with the same program.
- Show both the treeform menu and textual content of the file
-> User can easily see if there are a lot of unused menuentries that 
only slow down parsing
-> User can edit file directly
-> This requires some update_treeform_representation function

- Jasper already wrote desktop entry (those .desktop files) parser so 
you don't have to do that again.

If you start writing an editor let me know so that everyone doesn't have 
to invent the wheel.

- Tuukka