Debian Multimedia Menus (discussion)

[Jonas Smedegaard]

On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 09:31:05PM +0100, rosea.grammostola wrote:
>On 12/07/2010 04:33 PM, rosea.grammostola wrote:
>>When working with Multimedia / Proaudio on Linux | Debian, you have 
>>a lot of small packages installed pretty soon (one task one tool). 
[snip]
>>I thought, isn't there a way to make a better menu by the Debian 
>>Multimedia Team? A bit like Ubuntu Studio has done e.g. an extra menu 
>>package you can install if you want to do Multimedia production, but 
>>then better?

Great that you put attention to this!

An extra menu package dosn't feel very Debian to me, though.  Debian 
logic is to propose a change to Debian Policy to have the improved 
organisation apply universally, not only when a certain package is 
installed.

    aptitude install less debian-policy
    zless /usr/share/doc/debian-policy/menu-policy.txt.gz

That said, nothing stops us from *both* work on improving the official 
Debian Menu System *and* some package with a custom tweak tied to one or 
more specific desktop menu systems.  Same initial discussion that you've 
now opened apply to both. :-)


>I split up Multimedia (players) and Sound & Video (production)

+1


>At this point I have 7 extra entries in Sound & Video
>
>  1. Audio Editing (Editing, Mixing, Mastering: Audacity, jack-rack,
>     lv2rack, guitarix etc )
>  2. JACK (Jack and Alsa tools like qjackctl, japa, jack_mixer and
>     software mixers for alsa audio cards for example)
>  3. MIDI (Midi tools like Vkeybd, qsynth)
>  4. Musician (Musescore notation editor, solfege, Chordata, gtklick 
>     etc)
>  5. Recording (DAW: ardour, qtractor)
>  6. Synth (phasex, yoshimi, puredata, Qutecsound etc.)
>  7. Video Editing (pitivi, xjadeo, kino etc)
>
>I tried to keep it as simple as possible, not to many entries and 
>pretty broad areas cause every Debian Audio production app should be 
>able to be entered in a certain entry...

Let's use the same format as the Debian Menu System - both to ease 
passing the discussion to the debian-policy@ list later, and to help 
ensure we are talking about same things (e.g. where exactly in the menu 
hierarchy each section is placed, and what is descriptive text):

Applications/Sound & Video
     Sound & Video production

     Applications/Sound & Video/Audio Editing
         Editing, Mixing, Mastering

         Examples: audacity, jack-rack, lv2rack, guitarix

     Applications/Sound & Video/JACK
         Jack and Alsa tools

         Examples: qjackctl, japa, jack_mixer
     Applications/Sound & Video/MIDI
         Midi tools

         Examples: vkeybd, qsynth

     Applications/Sound & Video/Musician
         Music score composition, and live musician training tools

         Examples: musescore, solfege, chordata, gtklick 

     Applications/Sound & Video/Recording
         Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) and harddisk recording (HDR)

         Examples: ardour, qtractor

     Applications/Sound & Video/Synth
         Syntesizers and programmatic sound processing

         Examples: phasex, yoshimi, puredata, qutecsound

     Applications/Sound & Video/Video Editing

         Examples: pitivi, xjadeo, kino 

     Applications/Multimedia
         Players


I took the liberty to add or extend some descriptive text.  Please 
double-check that I did not distort your intended meaning of some.


>A other thing that has to be thought of, is how this all applies to 
>other WMs like KDE, XFCE etc. All though, if you create a 
>DebianMultimedia-menu, people are free to install it or not...

The Debian menu system has plugins for various WMs.  The beauty of this 
is that if we stick to that, we need not deal with the details of each 
and every oddball WM menu engine.


   - Jonas

-- 
   * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
   * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

   [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-multimedia-maintainers/attachments/20101224/4b4b9743/attachment-0001.pgp>