7 The technical committee adopts the changes to policy regarding menu
8 entries proposed by Charles Plessy, and additionally resolves that
9 packages providing desktop files shall not also provide a menu file.
13 The technical committee was asked in #741573 to decide an issue of
14 Debian technical policy regarding menu regarding the menu system.
18 The technical committee would like to thank everyone who participated
19 in the discussion of #741573 and the patience of the Policy Editors as
20 the technical committee worked through this issue very slowly.
26 1. The Debian Policy Manual states (§9.6) that 'The Debian menu
27 package provides a standard interface between packages providing
28 applications and "menu programs"'. It further states that 'All
29 packages that provide applications that need not be passed any
30 special command line arguments for normal operations should
31 register a menu entry for those applications'.
33 2. All details about menu system requirement are delegated to the
34 Debian Menu sub-policy and Debian Menu System manuals (the
35 "Debian menu system").
37 3. An external specification, the Freedesktop Desktop Entry
38 Specification (the ".desktop spec"), with native support in many
39 X desktop environments, has appeared since the Debian Menu
40 system was developed. The .desktop spec offers a fairly strict
41 super-set of Debian Menu system functionality.
43 4. The .desktop specification has significant technical benefits
44 for users over the Debian menu system. The .desktop
45 specification works together with the freedesktop.org mime type
46 and icon specifications to provide operations expected by
47 desktop users from other environments, such as Mac OS X or
48 Windows. As such, applications must provide a .desktop file to
49 operate well in most desktop environments.
51 5. The Debian Technical Committee has been asked to resolve a
52 dispute between maintainers of Debian Policy over a change that
54 i. incorporates the description of the FreeDesktop menu system
55 and its use in Debian for listing program in desktop menus
56 and associating them with media types
58 ii. softens the wording on the Debian Menu system to reflect that
59 in Jessie it will be neither displayed nor installed by
60 default on standard Debian installations.
64 The Technical Committee has reviewed the underlying technical
65 issues around this question and has resolved that Debian will be
66 best served by migrating away from our own Debian Menu System and
67 towards the common Freedesktop Desktop Entry Specification, and
68 that menu information for applications should not be duplicated in
69 two different formats.
71 To encourage this change, we make menu files optional, ask that
72 packages include .desktop files as appropriate and prohibit
73 packages from providing both menu and .desktop files for the same
76 Using its power under §6.1.1 to decide on any matter of technical
77 policy, and its power under §6.1.5 to offer advice:
79 1. The Technical Committee adopts the changes proposed by Charles
80 Plessy in ba679bff[1].
82 2. In addition to those changes, the Technical Committee resolves
83 that packages providing a .desktop file shall not also provide a
84 menu file for the same application.
86 3. We further resolve that "menu programs" should not depend on the
87 Debian Menu System and should instead rely on .desktop file
88 contents for constructing a list of applications to present to
91 4. We advise the maintainers of the 'menu' package to update that
92 package to reflect this increased focus on .desktop files by
93 modifying the 'menu' package to use .desktop files for the
94 source of menu information in addition to menu files.
96 5. Discussion of the precise relationship between menu file
97 section/hints values and .desktop file Categories values may be
98 defined within the Debian Menu sub-policy and Debian Menu
101 6. Further modifications to the menu policy are allowed using the
102 normal policy modification process.
104 [1]: https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/dbnpolicy/policy.git/commit/?id=ba679bff76f5b9152f43d5bc901b9b3aad257479