Debian Menu System

Abstract

The menu package was inspired by the install-fvwm2-menu program from the old fvwm2 package. However, menu tries to provide a more general interface for menu building. With the update-menus command from this package, no package needs to be modified for every X window manager again, and it provides a unified interface for both text- and X-oriented programs.

Copyright Notice

Copyright ©1997 Joost Witteveen, Joey Hess, Christian Schwarz.

This manual is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version.

This is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

A copy of the GNU General Public License is available as /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution or on the World Wide Web at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html. You can also obtain it by writing to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

Contents

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Menu from the viewpoint of a user
• 2.1 How/when do the window manger startup files get created?
• 2.2 Tuning of the generated window manager startup files
• 2.3 Optimization of menu tree: hints
• 3 What packages with applications should do
• 3.1 Registering your applications
• 3.2 Preferred menu structure
• 3.3 Hints
• 3.4 Icons
• 3.5 Fvwm's task and title bars
• 4 What packages with menu managers should do
• 5 How a user can override the menus
• 5.1 Configuring the menus
• 5.2 Specifying a ``no-menu entry''
• 5.3 Include: (one) other feature
• 6 The internals of the menu package
• 6.1 The update-menus program
• 6.2 The install-menu program
• 6.3 The install-menu config script definitions
• 6.4 Hints, tree optimization
• 6.5 Variables and functions in the install-menu scripts

Debian Menu System