On Tue, 2008-05-13 at 08:02 +0800, John Summerfield wrote: (Aggregation)
Seems to me that this approach might be quicker in users' hands - it might be ready for me seven seconds sooner.
I don't doubt it. The icewm-xdgmenu is not the ideal solution - hence, it's not installed by default.
For users' private menus while logged in, there's FAM (File Alteration Monitor) or its successor to see when you need to reread the file.
The menu created by icewm-xdg-menu looks like it's easily extended to allow an include to insert/merge a menu from users' home directory. For sysadmins' sanity, I'd suggest that each include would create a submenu, not replace or change any existing menu. Any includes would need to be preserved over a rebuild, but that doesn't look difficult.
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Hopefully, the work to do it is light and educational.
Feel free to submit patches. If they are sane, I'll be happy to include them.
One can. Some organisations have thousands of computers, so it might take some time.
I have no idea how your setup looks like. I'm using ssh with private/public keys to propagate settings (and menus) around my network using automated scripts.
There's no point in accepting user input before it's ready for it, and little point to storing it if it's going to be rebuilt next time.
I beg to differ.
Menus for KDE and Gnome get updated as new packages are installed. I've not explored how it's done, but it's much more convenient than logging off/logging on.
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I don't have a problem with it sticking with its existing menu/options/startup etc. I do think it should respect the conventions that apply in Fedora (and its relatives), and my cursory reading of RPM's triggers suggests that the triggers mechanism provides a way of keeping properly synchronised.
Again, I beg to differ. You cannot hold IceWM, fluxbox and rest of the light WM crowed to the same requirements as GNOME and KDE. (let alone fvwm and mwm).
As I said before, IceWM was never designed to compete with GNOME/KDE/XFCE; By design IceWM uses easy to modify (and understand) text configurations; If you rather not edit them yourself, IMO you are using the wrong tool for job.
Never the less, if you have solution that yields a better of-of-the-box experience without eating too much CPU and/or IO (Unlike, say, icewm-gnome2), I'll be happy include them.
Of course, when someone's logging in there might be other things happening. I'm not sure that this measures the same thing. However, [root@potoroo ~]# time /usr/share/icewm/startup
real 0m7.565s user 0m7.462s sys 0m0.073s
First, thanks for timing icewm-xdgmenu. 7 seconds is indeed too much.
Never the less, I have no viable solution that generates up-to-date menus without eating additional CPU/IO time. E.g. I've considered counting the desktop files - regenerating the menus if the count changes - but even this concept is far from ideal. (Counting files is slow and I/O intensive; one application might be replaced by another keeping the count constant; etc)
I don't like lots of computers that need individual attention. I would expect that DSS and other major departments, and companies, count their computers in tens of thousands, big multinationals in hundreds of thousands. I expect that they lock down their staff as firmly as we lock down the students. Running around giving computers individual attention isn't something that scales or that they would do.
OK. May I suggest the following. A. Create a master image under VMWare/KVM. B. Install everything you need. C. Generate the menus one using icewm-xdgmenu; disable it once you done. D. Put the master's public key in the local user's home. E. Create an image of the host and install it on N machines. F. On the master, create a small cron based script that: - Regenerated the menus. - Propagates them to all the client machines. G- Profit.
There's no documentation for /usr/bin/icewm-menu-gnome2, and no information on what might be good values to complete this: [root@potoroo ~]# /usr/bin/icewm-menu-gnome2 --help icewm-menu-gnome2: Usage: /usr/bin/icewm-menu-gnome2 [ --open PATH | --list PATH ] [root@potoroo ~]# /usr/bin/icewm-menu-gnome2 icewm-menu-gnome2: Usage: /usr/bin/icewm-menu-gnome2 [ --open PATH | --list PATH ]
Point taken. Sadly enough, icewm's own documentation doesn't include anything about using icewm-menu-gnome2. I should write something up and add it to %doc. In the mean time, you should add something like that [1] to your menu file.
- Gilboa [1] menuprog "Gnome" folder icewm-menu-gnome2 --list /usr/share/applications