[Pkg-ayatana-devel] Appmenu

[Ritesh Raj Sarraf]

CCing GTK Maintainers.

On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 5:20 PM, Evgeni Golov <evgeni at debian.org> wrote:
> Hi Ritesh,
>
> On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 05:14:38PM +0530, Ritesh Raj Sarraf wrote:
>
>> I noticed the impressive work Ubuntu has done for desktop integration.
>> Appmenu is a great effort they put into bringing uniformity across
>> applications using different toolkits.
>>
>> The gtk port of appmenu needs a patch to gtk libs. How would this be taken
>> care of?  Will the gtk maintainers be willing to carry a patch?
>
> Well, that depends, I guess.
> The best solution for everyone is -- of course -- when the patch is
> applied upstream. I do not know whether there is such an effort from the
> Ubuntu side or whether it was tried an denied. In the case it was
> denied, I guess the gtk maintainers would deny it too. Otherwise they
> might carry it. In any case you will have to ask them, not us :)
>

That's the very same thing I suspected. I hope the GTK maintainers can
express their view.

BTW, who is the effective upstream for gtk? I know a lot of gnome devs
are employed by Red Hat. Appmenu (and Untiy and other desktop
integration efforts by Ubuntu) is a project of Canonical.

I checked the gtk source for the Ubuntu package, and they are carrying
patches with them. So it is not committed upstream (and probably never
will).

I ask the "Effective Upstream" question because we have 2 vendors (RH
and Canonical) contending in the same space and there have been
instances in the past where Ubuntu patches were simply rejected (most
recent example I can recollect is Unity).
What is the stand for Debian? We definitely are much closer to Ubuntu
as they fork from us periodically.

> I would love to see appmenu in Debian and even more if you would like to
> help packaging it :)
>

Desktop integration is something I'd really love to see in Debian.
Currently we are different teams working with different packages
loosely integrated by debian tools (only the package management
stuff). We definitely should allow room for most (if not all) features
and let the merits for each decide the fate, which would mean every
package maintainer should be more accommodating of patches, which are
clean, simple and solve a fairly good purpose.

The AppMenu-Qt packaging is almost done. I built and am using it on my
box.This includes a KDE Plasmoid, which when enabled, will show Menu
for KDE and Qt applications (Including PyQT apps).
It was simpler because Canonical was able to push the core patch to
the Nokia Qt Foundation (for Qt 4.8).


The RFP for appmenu is:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=656177

-- 
Ritesh Raj Sarraf
RESEARCHUT - http://www.researchut.com
"Necessity is the mother of invention."