icewm has no programs

Mon May 12 23:54:36 UTC 2008

Gilboa Davara wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-05-12 at 22:58 +0800, John Summerfield wrote:
>> Gilboa Davara wrote:
>>> On Mon, 2008-05-12 at 15:28 +0800, John Summerfield wrote:
>>>> Gilboa Davara wrote:
>>>>> On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 7:32 AM, Gilboa Davara <gilboad at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 7:31 AM, Gilboa Davara <gilboad at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 5:28 AM, John Summerfield
>>>>>>> <debian at herakles.homelinux.org> wrote:
>>>>>>>> System: HP DC7700
>>>>>>>> OS fedora-release-9-2, AMD-64.
>>>>>>>> Last updated within the past two houes.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> "Programs" menu in icewm is absolutely empty. Essentially, it's unusable.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Please file a bug report against icewm.
>>>>>> ... And post the BZ# here.
>>>>>>
>>>> 446022
>>> OK. Assigned to me. (NEEDINFO)
>>>
>>>>> I assume that you're using icewm-xdgmenu, right?
>>>
>>>> Okay, it seems to me an undeclared dependency.
>>> Undeclared, by design.
>>> Some people might want to define the menus manually.
>> Seems to me that
>> 1. It should, in the first instance, share the global definitions,
>> 2. Maybe allow per-user overrides.
> 
> It is possible - but to be honest, it's far, far, too complicated to be
> worth while.

These are not really standards
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications?action=show&redirect=Standards

Desktop Entry Specification
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec

Desktop Menu Specification
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/menu-spec

> If you rather generate the menus manually, just remove the
> icewm-xdg-menu line from your system-wide /usr/share/icewm/startup file,
> or generate a private startup file in ~/.icewm/startup.

That implies I have to keep track of when it ought be done. Thanks, but 
no thanks. It could become a pretty hefty maintenance burden.

>> As one who supports users' computers, I see grief for sysadmins in the 
>> current implementation. Sysadmins like computers to all be the same.
> 
> As long as all machines share the same application list, the menus
> should be the same.
> ... BTW, you can always generate the menus on your master machine, and
> copy the generated ~/.icewm/programs.autogen to each client machine.
> (-Without- installing the xdgmenu sub package.)

One can. Some organisations have thousands of computers, so it might 
take some time.

> 
>>>> Note, the description says "each time the user logs _in_."
>>> Indeed.
>> As I noted in the bug report, it does happen when one logs in, it 
>> happens asynchronously and had me a bit puzzled when I saw it twice 
>> before it was fully built.
>>
> 
> By design.
> I rather not block the login process while the menus are being built in
> the background.

There's no point in accepting user input before it's ready for it, and 
little point to storing it if it's going to be rebuilt next time.

Menus for KDE and Gnome get updated as new packages are installed. I've 
not explored how it's done, but it's much more convenient than logging 
off/logging on.

> 
>>>> I'd be happier if the menus were built by a script run by rpm; I've 
>>>> never looked at triggers, but I expect that this is the sort of thing 
>>>> they deal with.
>>> Problem is - I don't have any means to detect if the GNOME/KDE menu have
>>> been changed since the last login.
>> Look at what the triggers do. What (I think) you need is to know when 
>> the packages reflected in the menus get installed/removed, maybe updated.
> 
> Triggers? Do we have DB like triggers in RPM? Please explain.

/usr/share/doc/rpm-4.4.2.3/triggers

They've been there for years. However, I've never used them and I'm not 
sure of just what one can do with them.

> 
>>
>>> More-ever, even on my laptop (a PII/366, 256Mhz), rebuilding the menus
>>> eats ~1-3 seconds (being executed in the background).
>> I managed to see it not completed, twice, on a Core 2 Duo system.
> 
> Umm... weird.
> Just timed it on a CentOS5 VM running under an Athlon64/X2/5000 host and
> it took ~2.5-4 seconds.
> 
> Slower disks maybe? More applications?
> Worth checking.

2 Gbytes RAM. SATA disk. Machine basically idle, it's my system for 
testing (Xen haha and KVM), and not ordinarily busy unless I'm logged 
on, installing CentOS 5 or rebuilding Knoppix or installing a Windows 
domain or something.

> 
> Can you time it? * 
> 
> - Gilboa
> * time /usr/share/icewm/startup

Of course, when someone's logging in there might be other things 
happening. I'm not sure that this measures the same thing. However,
[root at potoroo ~]# time /usr/share/icewm/startup

real    0m7.565s
user    0m7.462s
sys     0m0.073s
[root at potoroo ~]# time /usr/share/icewm/startup

real    0m7.514s
user    0m7.432s
sys     0m0.074s
[root at potoroo ~]# uptime
  07:48:42 up  9:18,  2 users,  load average: 0.13, 0.03, 0.01
[root at potoroo ~]# rpm -qa | wc -l
1733
[root at potoroo ~]#

[root at potoroo ~]# find /usr/share/apps -name \*.desktop | wc -l
63
[root at potoroo ~]# find /usr/share/applications/ -name \*.desktop | wc -l
366
[root at potoroo ~]#

> 
> 
> 

-- 

Cheers
John

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