Menu protocol.

[Mike Hearn]

On Tue, 2005-03-08 at 19:59 -0800, Scott Ritchie wrote:
> On this matter, do we want to create a Wine top-level entry in the
> Applications menu?  We can start it as an Ubuntu-specific extension,
> include the appropriate .desktop files in the Ubuntu package (I'll write
> them myself), and then just send changes upstream?

I'm not sure we want to expose the name "Wine" in the UI, that's a cute
abbreviation for developers but communicates nothing to the newbie end
user. What might work better is simply having a top level "Windows
Applications" menu like we do in Crossover. Then winecfg can go on the
top level of the start menu.

I don't think we want to expose anything else, except maybe "Perform
virtual Windows reboot" and "Uninstall Windows applications". Stuff like
regedit is rather obscure. Notepad is useless except for testing your
new setup. The task manager - ditto.

> Stuff could also be installed here that isn't Wine explicitly, like the
> Winetools package.

Actually mapping the Windows menus to the new XDG spec is a little
tricky and so far nobody has done it, not even CW. When 4.1 came out I
think distro-specific hacks were required to make it work on Fedora
(can't quite remember). Hopefully the situation has improved since then.

Doing so certainly requires coding, so I wouldn't rush to create a top
level menu until somebody does that work and we can actually fill it
with end-user interesting items like "Microsoft Word" or "iTunes".

Also I'd favour doing it upstream *first* then letting it propagate down
into the distros instead of whacking something together in Ubuntu then
trying to force it upstream.

For now, if you don't feel like hacking on our menu code, you could get
somebody (Jimmac?) to draw a nice icon for Win32 EXE files. Currently we
associate them with ourselves but they have no icons, which is a bit
poor. Once again, doing it upstream (in GNOME/KDE or hicolor) first is
preferable, Ubuntu/Etiquette specific artwork can come later.

thanks -mike