Hi all,

I noticed a while back that if we install all the blends packages it makes menus as bit of a mess [1].

There are other menus touched, too, Internet is just an example - sound and video gets things like wsjt-x, freedv and js8call.

Before I go filing bugs (and patches), I wanted to check in and see if anyone else had strong opinions on cleaning this up before the next release. It doesn't really impact Gnome users, but lxde, kde and others are affected.

As there's talk and progress of blends being in the installer[2] I think it's worth a look.

Freedesktop Desktop Categories [2] has good guidance on where things should go and reading it, I see two paths:
1) Making sure that everything falls under Education and/or Science, and also Utilities. Critically, I don't think anything hamradio falls under Audiovideo/ audio/video.
2) Sticking everything under Hamradio, counted as an Additional Category in freedesktop and adding extra-xdg-menus as a dependency. This implements both the hamradio and electronics menu. Alternatively we could merge bits of that into hamradio-files?

I think 2) is a nice to-have for vanity reasons but isn't very friendly to other distros/upstreams who might not have that menu, so it should only be a secondary category after options in 1).

If no one has any objections, I'll start filing bugs to that effect soon, I have
a few days in a hotel this week that might afford me the time.

Cheers,
Hibby


[1] https://cdn.woof.tech/media_attachments/files/113/392/623/226/767/106/ original/0052819ea302cd72.jpg

[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-blends/2024/12/msg00003.html

--
Hibby <[email protected]>
Debian Developer
Packet Radioist
MM0RFN
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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

I agree with you approach Dave.

On Mon, Jan 27, 2025, 01:10 Dave Hibberd <[email protected]> wrote:

Hi all,

I noticed a while back that if we install all the blends packages it makes menus as bit of a mess [1].

There are other menus touched, too, Internet is just an example - sound
and
video gets things like wsjt-x, freedv and js8call.

Before I go filing bugs (and patches), I wanted to check in and see if
anyone
else had strong opinions on cleaning this up before the next release. It doesn't really impact Gnome users, but lxde, kde and others are affected.

As there's talk and progress of blends being in the installer[2] I think
it's
worth a look.

Freedesktop Desktop Categories [2] has good guidance on where things
should go
and reading it, I see two paths:
1) Making sure that everything falls under Education and/or Science, and
also
Utilities. Critically, I don't think anything hamradio falls under Audiovideo/
audio/video.
2) Sticking everything under Hamradio, counted as an Additional Category
in
freedesktop and adding extra-xdg-menus as a dependency. This implements
both
the hamradio and electronics menu. Alternatively we could merge bits of
that
into hamradio-files?

I think 2) is a nice to-have for vanity reasons but isn't very friendly to other distros/upstreams who might not have that menu, so it should only be
a
secondary category after options in 1).

If no one has any objections, I'll start filing bugs to that effect soon,
I have
a few days in a hotel this week that might afford me the time.

Cheers,
Hibby

[1] https://cdn.woof.tech/media_attachments/files/113/392/623/226/767/106/ original/0052819ea302cd72.jpg <https://cdn.woof.tech/media_attachments/files/113/392/623/226/767/106/original/0052819ea302cd72.jpg>

[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-blends/2024/12/msg00003.html

--
Hibby <[email protected]>
Debian Developer
Packet Radioist
MM0RFN

<div dir="auto">I agree with you approach Dave.</div><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Jan 27, 2025, 01:10 Dave Hibberd &lt;<a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a>&gt; wrote:<br></

<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Hi all,<br>

I noticed a while back that if we install all the blends packages it makes <br> menus as bit of a mess [1].<br>

There are other menus touched, too, Internet is just an example - sound and <br>
video gets things like wsjt-x, freedv and js8call.<br>

Before I go filing bugs (and patches), I wanted to check in and see if anyone <br>
else had strong opinions on cleaning this up before the next release. It <br> doesn&#39;t really impact Gnome users, but lxde, kde and others are affected. <br>

As there&#39;s talk and progress of blends being in the installer[2] I think it&#39;s <br>
worth a look.<br>

Freedesktop Desktop Categories [2] has good guidance on where things should go <br>
and reading it, I see two paths: <br>
1) Making sure that everything falls under Education and/or Science, and also <br>
Utilities. Critically, I don&#39;t think anything hamradio falls under Audiovideo/<br>
audio/video.<br>
2) Sticking everything under Hamradio, counted as an Additional Category in <br>
freedesktop and adding extra-xdg-menus as a dependency. This implements both <br>
the hamradio and electronics menu. Alternatively we could merge bits of that <br>
into hamradio-files?<br>

I think 2) is a nice to-have for vanity reasons but isn&#39;t very friendly to <br>
other distros/upstreams who might not have that menu, so it should only be a <br>
secondary category after options in 1).<br>

If no one has any objections, I&#39;ll start filing bugs to that effect soon, I have <br>
a few days in a hotel this week that might afford me the time.<br>

Cheers,<br>
Hibby<br>


[1] <a href="https://cdn.woof.tech/media_attachments/files/113/392/623/226/767/106/original/0052819ea302cd72.jpg" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">https://cdn.woof.tech/media_attachments/files/113/392/623/226/767/106/<br>
original/0052819ea302cd72.jpg</a><br>

[2] <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-blends/2024/12/msg00003.html" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">https://lists.debian.org/debian-blends/2024/12/msg00003.html</a><br>

--  <br>
  Hibby &lt;<a href="mailto:[email protected]" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">[email protected]</a>&gt;<br>
  Debian Developer<br>
  Packet Radioist<br>
  MM0RFN</blockquote></div>

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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Greetings,

On Monday, 27 January 2025 14:31:21 GMT-4 Chris Reich wrote:

Greetings everyone,I use only xfce and all the fldigi family of
packages fall neatly into the 'ham radio' entry of the main menu. The
'ham radio' entry is added automatically upon installing fldigi in my experience. Should not ALL ham radio packages also fall under the
'ham radio' entry of the main menu? Forgive me if I fail to see a
larger picture, I'm new at this.Chris Reich; Rochester, New York

On Monday, January 27, 2025 at 10:06:35 AM EST, MJ Inabnit <[email protected]> wrote:

Greetings Hibby,

Thank you for your interest. This has been something that annoys me
as well, and a mess it does make.

I would vote to keep and use extra-xdg-menus.

Good luck and 73

Jaye

I can only vouch for KDE on Debian Sid and on Kubuntu 24 LTS
where the "Ham Radio" menu entry disappeared during some upgrade. Then
hamradio entries splattered all over the place into entries like
'Internet', Education', Science and Mathematics', 'Utilities' etc.
After I reintroduced "Ham Radio" into the menu again most of the
hamradio applications reappeared in the same menu automagically but
copies of all entries still were residing all over the place.
I reordered and deleted double entries, also made submenus under 'Ham
Radio' for CW, Digital, Logging, SDR, Propagation etc and rearranged everything.
Now I fear that all this work will be brought to nought by the next KDE update(s). We'll see ...

73 de Eike

On 1/26/25 4:09 PM, Dave Hibberd wrote:

Hi all,

I noticed a while back that if we install all the blends packages it
makes menus as bit of a mess [1].

There are other menus touched, too, Internet is just an example -
sound and video gets things like wsjt-x, freedv and js8call.

Before I go filing bugs (and patches), I wanted to check in and see
if anyone else had strong opinions on cleaning this up before the
next release. It doesn't really impact Gnome users, but lxde, kde
and others are affected.

As there's talk and progress of blends being in the installer[2] I
think it's worth a look.

Freedesktop Desktop Categories [2] has good guidance on where things
should go and reading it, I see two paths:
1) Making sure that everything falls under Education and/or Science,
and also Utilities. Critically, I don't think anything hamradio
falls under Audiovideo/ audio/video.
2) Sticking everything under Hamradio, counted as an Additional
Category in freedesktop and adding extra-xdg-menus as a dependency.
This implements both the hamradio and electronics menu.
Alternatively we could merge bits of that into hamradio-files?

I think 2) is a nice to-have for vanity reasons but isn't very
friendly to other distros/upstreams who might not have that menu,
so it should only be a secondary category after options in 1).

If no one has any objections, I'll start filing bugs to that effect
soon, I have a few days in a hotel this week that might afford me
the time.

Cheers,
Hibby

--
Eike Lantzsch KY4PZ / ZP5CGE

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Re: Daniele Forsi

Direwolf could still appear andure Internet because it does allow to
connect to the internet and maybe also xastir

Hmm. Direwolf is primarily an AX.25 modem, and xastir is an APRS
client. Just because they can talk TCP doesn't make them "internet".

current hamradio-files is described as "Ham radio call sign and prefix lists",
I'm against creating too many packages but maybe a new
hamradio-menuspackage would be too small?

I do not use any menus besides being happy that I can open the gnome
launcher, type "wsj<enter>" and have it launch wsjtx, so I pardon this
silly question: What would we actually put into that package? I
thought your proposal would be to fix the .desktop files in the
individual application packages (and possibly forwarding changes
upstream).

Christoph

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Hi Both,

I thought your proposal would be to fix the .desktop files in the individual application packages (and possibly forwarding changes
upstream).

it was Dave, not me,

Yep, that's what I'm suggesting!

I would add a submenu for each hamradio-* package
but it would probably increase the mess,
but this reminded that I looked at this a while ago and wrote a Python
script to extract information from desktop files, however the output
is messy (see the attached HTML file which contains columns for
categories and also for keywords)

Something tickled my brain here, but I couldn't put my finger on it until I sat down and thought the problem through.

Many years ago irl and I put in place the blend categories as a submenu structure [1] as an experiment.
We clearly intended to adopt the package but for whatever reason at the time
it did not get published and there has since been QA releases of extra-xdg- menus [2].

As I don't want to publish bugs and patches twice, I'm working on a little proof of concept to see how it looks to have subcategories. It turns out, rather neat! [3].

Unfortunately, while KDE's menu editor recognises categories, the menu doesn't display them. I imagine this is similar for Gnome, and those users account for the bulk of our install base (at a guess), so is this all a waste of time?
For users on Raspi and other downstreams, I see a reasonable amount of benefit, so it's probably worth persevering.

My current proposal is to add a binary `Recommends:` on `extra-
xdg-menus` and to modify the category of each package to contain `Category: Hamradio; X-Hamradio-<subcategory>` in line with their metapackage category.

The downside of this approach is that it makes it less attractive for upstream - no one else is implementing these categories, they're of no benefit to Fedora or other non Debian derivative users, and maintaining patches on *every* desktop file we ship is a lot more work on us for a neat menu.

Anyway this has all given me a hilarious new bug [4] to fight, so I guess I'd better try fixing that!

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/debian-hamradio-team/extra-xdg-menus/-/blob/ master/hamradio/hamradio.menu?ref_type=heads

[2] https://salsa.debian.org/debian/extra-xdg-menus

[3] https://cdn.woof.tech/media_attachments/files/114/078/125/276/241/618/ original/75b302221fcf811a.png

[4] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1099077

--
Hibby <[email protected]>
Debian Developer
Packet Radioist
MM0RFN
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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Re: Dave Hibberd

As I don't want to publish bugs and patches twice, I'm working on a little proof of concept to see how it looks to have subcategories. It turns out, rather neat! [3].

Neat indeed!

Unfortunately, while KDE's menu editor recognises categories, the menu doesn't
display them. I imagine this is similar for Gnome, and those users account for
the bulk of our install base (at a guess), so is this all a waste of time?

I switched to Gnome only 2 years ago, and am probably not the typical
user - my use of menus is limited to Mod4-A to open the select-whatever-the-name-is-panel and type the first few chars of the
program I want to open. Everything is a huge flat list only anyway.

https://gnulinux.ch/bl-content/uploads/pages/87055e185853fdd2619a25355bd96d29/arcmenu_4.webp

My current proposal is to add a binary `Recommends:` on `extra-
xdg-menus` and to modify the category of each package to contain `Category: Hamradio; X-Hamradio-<subcategory>` in line with their metapackage category.

Ack.

The downside of this approach is that it makes it less attractive for upstream
- no one else is implementing these categories, they're of no benefit to Fedora
or other non Debian derivative users, and maintaining patches on *every* desktop file we ship is a lot more work on us for a neat menu.

Could we perhaps make this a standard or policy document that we can
point upstreams at? Even if only a few adopt it in their .desktop
files, it would still help to push this to the world.

Christoph

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Friday 28 February 2025 09:47:09 GMT Christoph Berg wrote:

I switched to Gnome only 2 years ago, and am probably not the typical
user - my use of menus is limited to Mod4-A to open the select-whatever-the-name-is-panel and type the first few chars of the
program I want to open. Everything is a huge flat list only anyway.

I too am quite fond of that method of interaction! KDE has an 'Application Dashboard' mode that is similar.
As it transpires, my earlier statement was wrong - the 'Application Menu' in KDE supports nested menus [1].

KDE Plasma 6 ships with 3 alternative application launchers as standard, I bet there's more hidden too!

Could we perhaps make this a standard or policy document that we can
point upstreams at? Even if only a few adopt it in their .desktop
files, it would still help to push this to the world.

Sounds good, any pointers on a starter?


[1] https://cdn.woof.tech/media_attachments/files/114/078/733/198/531/192/original/bab6bc5f2d8c945c.png

--
Hibby <[email protected]>
Debian Developer
Packet Radioist
MM0RFN
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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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Re: Dave Hibberd

Could we perhaps make this a standard or policy document that we can
point upstreams at? Even if only a few adopt it in their .desktop
files, it would still help to push this to the world.

Sounds good, any pointers on a starter?

Hmm, perhaps as part of https://salsa.debian.org/debian-hamradio-team/hamradio-maintguide

Christoph

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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Morning,

I started on this last night [1] in a proposed-updates branch, and included both a link and dedicated table! It's a first pass just to begin getting thoughts on a page, any and all contributions are welcome.

It occurred to me in mainguide there's no mention of the blend and metapackage categories, or how to add a package to the metapackages, so I think I'll reformat this away from 'menus' and into a more generic 'blend' that details updating [2] and the
various categories also.

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/debian-hamradio-team/hamradio-maintguide/-/blob/proposed-updates/menu.rst
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/blends-team/hamradio

Cheers!

--
Dave Hibberd <[email protected]>
Debian Developer
Packet Radioist
MM0RFN

On Wed, 5 Mar 2025, at 6:57 AM, Daniele Forsi wrote:

Dave,

your subcategories is a good idea

Sounds good, any pointers on a starter?

Hmm, perhaps as part of
https://salsa.debian.org/debian-hamradio-team/hamradio-maintguide

and perhaps add a reference to [1] which has the same hierarchy

[1] https://www.debian.org/blends/hamradio/get/metapackages

--
73 de IU5HKX Daniele

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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From: [email protected]

Dave Hibberd wrote:

Freedesktop Desktop Categories [2] has good guidance on where things should go
and reading it, I see two paths:

the [2] reference is to https://specifications.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/category-registry.html which is celar enough, while the page about Additional Categories is
not so clear https://specifications.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/additional-category-registry.html
my understanding is that if menu application doesn't support the
additional HamRadio category, then it should use the main category,
but current implementation instead duplicate entries.

1) Making sure that everything falls under Education and/or Science, and also Utilities. Critically, I don't think anything hamradio falls under Audiovideo/
audio/video.

Direwolf could still appear andure Internet because it does allow to
connect to the internet and maybe also xastir

2) Sticking everything under Hamradio, counted as an Additional Category in freedesktop and adding extra-xdg-menus as a dependency. This implements both the hamradio and electronics menu. Alternatively we could merge bits of that into hamradio-files?

current hamradio-files is described as "Ham radio call sign and prefix lists", I'm against creating too many packages but maybe a new
hamradio-menuspackage would be too small?

I think 2) is a nice to-have for vanity reasons but isn't very friendly to other distros/upstreams who might not have that menu, so it should only be a secondary category after options in 1).

I think that in the worst case it will result in the same mess as today

If no one has any objections, I'll start filing bugs to that effect soon

I'm no against your suggestions, let's see the bug reports
--
73 de IU5HKX Daniele

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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From: [email protected]

Dave,

your subcategories is a good idea

Sounds good, any pointers on a starter?

Hmm, perhaps as part of https://salsa.debian.org/debian-hamradio-team/hamradio-maintguide

and perhaps add a reference to [1] which has the same hierarchy

[1] https://www.debian.org/blends/hamradio/get/metapackages

--
73 de IU5HKX Daniele

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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