[Ubuntu] Re: UbuntuGIS Upgrade

[Hamish]

Tim wrote:
> Daily builds of GRASS 6.4.1 are provided here:
> https://launchpad.net/~grass/+archive/grass-stable
> 
> One question regarding GRASS:
> Why is the *.desktop file not installed and added to the
> Gnome menu?

I haven't looked at these packages, so no idea why not in this
case, but the general idea is that the installer should copy
the grass.desktop file to /usr/share/applications/ and the
.desktop file should include a line like:

Categories=Application;Education;Geography;

[We should consider adding "Science;" to that mix]

you can find this file in the grass source code in gui/icons/


the gnome/xfce/(kde?) menus are then auto-generated by sorting on
the keywords found in the .desktop Categories lines at user
run-time. (note icon dirs in /usr/local/ and ~/ are also scanned
for .desktop files, even if that isn't well documented)

WindowMaker-like WMs (fluxbox et al.) in Debian/Ubuntu use the
grass.menu file, with a similar "section=" line to hint the menu
creation. But those menus are (re)built at install time, not
at runtime like the opendesktop .desktop based menus.


> Unfortunately, I do not have time set the GRASS 7builder up.

Maybe not so bad as g7 should not be used for production work at
this time; not that it's known to be buggy, just that new bugs
remain unknown -- very similar to "would you use debian/sid for
a production server?" It usually works fine.. but no guarantees.
Users of grass7 should be able to help find, report, and fix
bugs, which generally includes tweaking and (re)building from
source. I've got similar feelings about the grass6.5 branch,
but it should be safer for the developer/tester or curious
power-user to play with.


thanks,
Hamish