[Pkg-electronics-devel] Appologies

[Peter Clifton]

Sorry, I see the KiCAD Debian packages are maintained separately from
the rest of the electronics packages in Debian, thus it less likely that
the maintainers / uploaders will have been aware of all the discussions
(mostly instigated by myself) regarding the menu categorisation of
electronics apps in Debian, and in general - upstream.

The stance I take, is that with extra-xdg-menus as a "Recommends"
dependency, a default install will give users an "Electronics" menu, and
thus a good user experience when installing these specialist packages.

Lintian will complain when you throw it a file with just
"Engineering;Electronics;" as categories, however this warning can (and
SHOULD) be ignored since extra-xdg-menus takes care of the problem.
(Lintian doesn't know that!)


I think all us electronics packagers, upstreams interested parties (I'm
a gEDA/gaf and gEDA/PCB upstream developer) need to come together and
work consistently to ensure these categorisations are uniform across our
packages, and give a decent user experience out of the box. The XDG
spec. is rubbish in this regard - unfortunately, they don't acknowledge
the serious limitations of their prescribed categorisations.


The custom Fedora Electronics Lab (FEL), and an Ubuntu variant for
electronics all use "Engineering;Electronics;" as categories, and
mitigate the omission in the XDG menu spec by adding additional menu
trees. (Primarily the root menu "Electronics" when such applications are
present).

I'm firmly convinced that Debian Edu should look to match on either
"Engineering", or "Electronics" and merge these applications into
whatever menu they see fit. (I wondered about Science / Physics / D&T,
thinking about where we learned electronics in school).

Adding incorrect categories to applications devalues the meta-data in
our .desktop files, and prevents better menu hierarchies and
classifications being applied by distros and integrators.


I apologise for being bad-tempered when I first posted, but seems like
an uphill battle to keep these menus consistent.. every new upload in
pkg-electronics from a different developer gets another "fix", patching
in new bogus menu categories, often in contravention with a well thought
out upstream policy on its .desktop file - just because Lintian is
complaining.

Regards,

-- 
Peter Clifton

Electrical Engineering Division,
Engineering Department,
University of Cambridge,
9, JJ Thomson Avenue,
Cambridge
CB3 0FA

Tel: +44 (0)7729 980173 - (No signal in the lab!)
Tel: +44 (0)1223 748328 - (Shared lab phone, ask for me)