Menu Editor

[Raphael Groner]

Jannis Pohlmann jannis at xfce.org
Mon May 7 14:50:01 CEST 2012

>> On Mon, 07 May 2012 12:59:45 +0200
>> Nick Schermer <nick at xfce.org> wrote:

>> There is also not much to discuss, because Xfce is written in C +
>> Gtk.

> Exactly. Anything that is ever supposed to be crucial for Xfce or be
> included in the core of it will have to be written in C. I'd say Vala
> is acceptable as well as it is only required at build time and is
> compiled down to C code anyway.
> 

Seriously meant question: Why is Alacarte then supported as an
application that is written in Python and mostly orientated to Gnome? It
does not use Garcon, instead gnome-menus. 
Compiling down to C code is no argument at my point of view. Python or
Java can also be transferred to C code (for instance, there's java2cpp
[0], don't take that hint too seriously :D ). At the end, there's
always platform-dependend binary code... Last but not least, a
discussion about programming languages will not lead to the goal.

> What is more, the availability of complete Python bindings for Xfce
> (or the lack of such; don't recall the status right now) represents an
> unnecessary hurdle for developers. So, yeah, just stick to C/Vala - be
> a serious programmer!

Okay. So far I can summarize the technical requirements for a serious
Xfce menu editor as the following points:

- C++ extremely preferred (sorry, OOD/OOP is state of the art)
- Garcon as the backend for implementation of menu specification [1]
- Gtk for GUI, nearly Gtkmm then due to object orientation

Recently, there was some patching going on upstream for the good old
Alacarte. And doubtfully, there was the Fedora 17 release with a new
Gnome3 and a broken Alacarte. 
But honestly, I don't see any serious future for Alacarte+Xfce. It seems
that the people do like lxmed [2], the so called menu editor for
LXDE. To me, it seems to be a schizophrenic project cause LXDE [3]
claims to be "lightweight" (just as Xfce, hehe) but why the heck then
lxmed is written in Java, so then the JVM, that will bring another ton
of unrequired dependencies with it to garbage the system of the user?
Maybe cause the developer likes AWT for the GUI stuff. 

So why not port the lxmed code to CPP and Garcon/Gtkmm?

[0] http://sourceforge.net/projects/java2cpp/
[1] http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/
[2] http://lxmed.sourceforge.net/
[3] http://lxde.org/