Change awn-manager desktop file category

[Frederik Himpe]

Please remove the desktop file for the awn manager. This tool can be started from awn itself, so there's no need for having its own menu entry. If every application on my system would be creating a separate menu item for its configuration tool, my menus would explode with items I am rather starting from within the app itself.

[Mark Lee (malept)]

On the other hand, you don't necessarily need Awn running to configure it. So, if someone wanted to do that, it is a possibility (without having to resort to using the command line).

[Frederik Himpe (fhimpe)]

Why would one want to configure a program which he is not even running at that moment? I don't think this is a very common use case.

[Mark Lee (malept)]

It's actually rather common. In my settings submenu, There's a couple of options for configuring Java, even though I rarely run Java-based applications or go to websites with Java applets. There are people who have both Compiz Fusion and another window manager (e.g., Metacity), but both settings entries are in the settings menu.

Here's a use case for you:
Bob has noticed that Awn 0.2 has crashed when his Pidgin file transfer has ended. Knowing that the bug triagers will ask him various questions about his Awn configuration (as he has reported bugs for Awn before), he opens awn-manager from the desktop menu and copies down any configuration info that he feels is relevant to his bug, and submits his bug report with that information included.

[Frederik Himpe (fhimpe)]

Well, the Java configuration things and awn are the only apps on my system working like that, and I think both are wrong.

Even if awn crashes (which ideally should not even happen), somebody reporting the bug should be smart enough to copy its configuration file by hand (which is actually less work and more accurate than explaining how it is configured in the graphical configuration panel).

But let's forget this for a moment. I have been thinking about this a bit more: actually AWN should not have a menu entry in Applications at all. For the simple reason that AWN is not a classic application you launch from time to time, and which you quit when you don't need it anymore. The most common use case is that you let it start automatically at login time and let it run for the whole session.

So my proposal is to remove both entries in the Applications menu, and put the configuration tool in GNOME's System - Preferences menu (done by giving it the desktop categories GTK;Settings;). The configuration panel should have an option to "Automatically start AWN at the start of the desktop session" (actually I have not found a way to do this automatically now, which seems a usability problem to me) and it should also have a "Start" button to start awn immediately.

This way, everything is possible without putting menu entries in a menu where they do not really belong.

[Mark Lee (malept)]

I'll change the awn-manager desktop file category in time for the 0.2.4 release. However, I disagree that the Awn desktop file should be removed; one (future) use case that I see is creating new Awn docks.

[pavpanchekha (pavpanchekha)]

One current use case is testing changes to awn code.

[Mark Lee (malept)]

Fixed in trunk r177.

[Andrew Starr-Bochicchio (andrewsomething)]

New release: https://edge.launchpad.net/awn/0.2/0.2.4/