GlobalMenu Application for inclusion as a GNOME module

[Pierre Slamich]

Dear GNOME maintainers,

This is a proposal on behalf of the GlobalMenu developers for its inclusion either in gnome-applets or as a dependency of GNOME.

GlobalMenu is an applet that lets the user have its application menus displayed in the Panel rather than in the windows. For those who haven't heard about it, think of GNUStep or MacOS as an example. Or you can look at a screenshot to get an idea http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu

- Target: proposed for the desktop module set
- Dependencies: No new dependencies are introduced for either compiling the released tarball or the runtime. An up-to-date vala compiler for the developers.
- Resource usage: currently no NOME infrastructure are allocated for the project. Google Code is the main hosting service and Launchpad is used for Ubuntu packaging and translations. We have sent a mail to apply for GNOME resources.
- Adoption in Distributions: none so far (Ubuntu Netbook Remix has shown some interest)

- GNOME-ness & community: The project uses VALA as the main programming language. Various bugs in VALA were discovered and fixed by the Global Menu developers. For the moment the team doesn't strongly need to cooperate with the internationalization, user documentation, accessibility, usability, bugsquad teams (and etc) of the community. The team is always open to such cooperation.

- License : GlobalMenu is currently licensed under the GPLv2+ and LGPLv2+. The documentation and the majority of the code have all been written by team members; therefore the project can be easily re-licensed to meet the GNOME requirements.

- We have a pool of developers, committed doc writers, bug hunters and translators which is an asset to keep deadlines, and to bring innovation, along with quality assurance. We have a good track record, as can be seen throughout our issue tracker and our Ubuntuforums thread. We strive to keep aware of all the evolutions going around, we successfully coordinated with KDE for the spread of the GlobalMenu spec beyond our initial GNOME focus.

- Willingness and ability to follow release rules and release schedule and progress on a regular basis: We have an Italian dev, but we also have a German dev and a Chinese dev. Overall, we have thus time-conscious people ;-)

- Improving overall desktop usability: The document-centric functionalities of Global Menu are available on GNUStep and MacOS, but most importantly we think that it's a very nice addition to the already strong GTK stack that will, playing along GNOME Shell, enable application developers to build upon it. Moreover, it's implemented in a better way than the other globalmenu implementations, listening to user feedback and building upon Gnome's unique features. We have relatively wide compatibility, and we believe adoption in Gnome 2.30/3.0 would enable further adoption and standardisation on the developer side, pushing ISV to provide native GTK interfaces for at least the menus (Firefox, OpenOffice, Java to name a few). This will both push GNOME's interface forward, and push the GTK-toolkit forward.

- Developer attitude: We like to engage with upstream (GNOME for the moment :-), possibly the Freedesktop's project afterwards for standardization) and downstream, as well as our user base. We're very open and our forum thread and our bug tracker testifies that. We have an open development process and we prefer daily commits to large code drops. We engaged with GNOME, we also engaged with XFCE and KDE. We're nice and cool people (really :-)

- GNOME-ness: We use GTK2 and other GNOME2 technologies (VALA, all the standard GNOME guidelines and techniques) and we have a GNOME look and feel. We rewrote the software from ground to bottom to use the state of the art technologies. We of course don't use the obsolete stuff that GNOME 3 aims to get rid of.

- UI: We have no problem engaging with the UI team to make GlobalMenu even better UI-wise. We strive to keep in line with the GNOME look and feel, HIG compliance, a careful choice of default settings, and clean interface design.

- Accessibility: Though we haven't delved into the matter, we're also ready to engage should issues arise.

- Internationalization is already done in the GNOME-compliant fashion. All text is i18n-ized and the app is localized (RTL).

- Use of GNOME resources: While we don't currently use them, we'll be happy to switch should our inclusion be accepted, and we have actually already applied to get GlobalMenu on GNOME's infrastructure.

- Documentation: Documentation already exists in the project wiki, and our code is clear and clean. We're willing either to help the existing docs team on incorporating our current document or to directly join them in this work. We're anyway motivated to make useful documentation available. Nevertheless we will strive to make GlobalMenu as simple as possible while increasing its power. We'll contact soon the GNOME Documentation Team to organize about the matter.

- Relation with GNOME 3.0: As proposed in GNOME 3.0, the Shell features a menu item which provides the access to the application's actions. The idea is good, however most current applications in GNOME do not support this feature. Neither does the GTK toolkit provide the necessary facilities for it. While we need to systematically invent it in GNOME 3.0 (eg, by extending GtkUIBuilder), some kind of legacy support should also be provided. This is where Global Menu becomes relevant to GNOME 3.0. Global Menu already has the code to extract the main menu bar from the applications. Once the global menu plugin for GTK is enabled (and it can be selectively enabled), each GtkWindow instance will carry a special property containing an introspection of its menu bar, and the sub menus. This information can be used to reconstruct a menu in the Shell's application menu item. Global Menu also provides a protocol to sync the selection and activation of menu items.

Thanks a lot for bearing with that long and overly detailed proposal. I look forward to your reviews, comments, suggestions, bashings, etc :-)

Yu and Pierre, on behalf of the whole GlobalMenu team

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[Sandy Armstrong]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 3:40 PM, Pierre Slamich<pierre.slamich@...> wrote:
> Dear GNOME maintainers,
>
> This is a proposal on behalf of the GlobalMenu developers for its inclusion
> either in gnome-applets or as a dependency of GNOME.
>
> GlobalMenu is an applet that lets the user have its application menus
> displayed in the Panel rather than in the windows. For those who haven't
> heard about it, think of GNUStep or MacOS as an example. Or you can look at
> a screenshot to get an idea http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu

Assuming gnome-panel (and therefore panel applets) go away in GNOME
2.30, do you have a plan for integrating GlobalMenu in gnome-shell?

Sandy
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[John Stowers]

On Thu, 2009-09-03 at 00:40 +0200, Pierre Slamich wrote:
> Dear GNOME maintainers,
>
> This is a proposal on behalf of the GlobalMenu developers for its
> inclusion either in gnome-applets or as a dependency of GNOME.

+1 from me, I use this daily, and it works wonderfully.

While some might argue that the GTK_MODULES implementation is hacky it
works well in practice.

John


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[Patryk Zawadzki]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 12:44 PM, John
Stowers<john.stowers.lists@...> wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-09-03 at 00:40 +0200, Pierre Slamich wrote:
>> Dear GNOME maintainers,
>>
>> This is a proposal on behalf of the GlobalMenu developers for its
>> inclusion either in gnome-applets or as a dependency of GNOME.
> +1 from me, I use this daily, and it works wonderfully.
>
> While some might argue that the GTK_MODULES implementation is hacky it
> works well in practice.

Unless you ever want to use an MPX-enabled X server of course ;)

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[Ted Gould]

On Thu, 2009-09-03 at 12:58 +0200, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 12:44 PM, John
> Stowers<john.stowers.lists@...> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2009-09-03 at 00:40 +0200, Pierre Slamich wrote:
> >> Dear GNOME maintainers,
> >>
> >> This is a proposal on behalf of the GlobalMenu developers for its
> >> inclusion either in gnome-applets or as a dependency of GNOME.
> > +1 from me, I use this daily, and it works wonderfully.
> >
> > While some might argue that the GTK_MODULES implementation is hacky it
> > works well in practice.
>
> Unless you ever want to use an MPX-enabled X server of course ;)

I don't understand.  Why is MPX incompatible with Global Menu?

                --Ted



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[Colin Walters]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 7:17 PM, Sandy
Armstrong<sanfordarmstrong@...> wrote:
>
> Assuming gnome-panel (and therefore panel applets) go away in GNOME
> 2.30, do you have a plan for integrating GlobalMenu in gnome-shell?

The design for 3 is currently that application-global actions go in
the application menu area, while document or window-specific ones
remain in the window.
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[Patryk Zawadzki]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 3:39 PM, Ted Gould<ted@...> wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-09-03 at 12:58 +0200, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
>> Unless you ever want to use an MPX-enabled X server of course ;)
> I don't understand.  Why is MPX incompatible with Global Menu?

As Xi2/MPX allows you to have one focus per input including being able
to focus two windows at a time (each with its own menu bar).

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[Sandy Armstrong]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 6:44 AM, Colin Walters<walters@...> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 7:17 PM, Sandy
> Armstrong<sanfordarmstrong@...> wrote:
>>
>> Assuming gnome-panel (and therefore panel applets) go away in GNOME
>> 2.30, do you have a plan for integrating GlobalMenu in gnome-shell?
>
> The design for 3 is currently that application-global actions go in
> the application menu area, while document or window-specific ones
> remain in the window.

I'm not going to debate this decision (which I disagree with) here,
but does that mean that in the opinion of gnome-shell developers,
GlobalMenu will not be a useful or necessary addition to gnome-shell?

Thanks,
Sandy
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[Steve Frécinaux]

Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 3:39 PM, Ted Gould<ted@...> wrote:
>> On Thu, 2009-09-03 at 12:58 +0200, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
>>> Unless you ever want to use an MPX-enabled X server of course ;)
>> I don't understand.  Why is MPX incompatible with Global Menu?
>
> As Xi2/MPX allows you to have one focus per input including being able
> to focus two windows at a time (each with its own menu bar).

And how would it play with the proposed gnome-shell design wrt the
"application menu" ?

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[Colin Walters]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 9:50 AM, Sandy
Armstrong<sanfordarmstrong@...> wrote:
>
> I'm not going to debate this decision (which I disagree with) here,
> but does that mean that in the opinion of gnome-shell developers,
> GlobalMenu will not be a useful or necessary addition to gnome-shell?

Well first let me state my unhappiness with the current model of
proposing things as additions to GNOME, which is that the proposals
are too far tilted towards "we want to modify the source dependency
graph in this way", but what they should really be about is "here's
our proposed changes to the user experience, and we would like to
implement it like this".

What does adding global menu to 2.30 *mean*?  Is it just another thing
in the list of applets?  Or is it being proposed to be on by default?
Those are *radically* different things.

I see global menu a lot like a nontrivial Firefox extension; something
that changes the UX in a fairly major way and ties deeply into the
guts of the stack.  Which gets me back to how I think GNOME should
work.  We should be providing a stable, well designed core.  And we
should have a system for finding extensions.   In other words,
something like: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox

Now of course software installation in the free software community has
long been held in the kung-fu death grip of those people who think it
makes sense to have the OS kernel, developer tools, and user
applications all mixed into one big list of undifferentiated stuff and
presented/managed exactly the same.  It's a thorny problem, don't get
me wrong, but if say there were a way to tag system packages as
"gnome-core-extension", and have a PackageKit dialog which can filter
by tags or the like, and some popularity metric, I think that'd be a
great way to present things like global menu.

Though much higher priority is some PackageKit way to present just
things which have a .desktop file.
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[Richard Hughes-6]

2009/9/3 Colin Walters <walters@...>:
> Though much higher priority is some PackageKit way to present just
> things which have a .desktop file.

We've already got that, it's the GUI filter.

Richard
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[Colin Walters]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Richard Hughes<hughsient@...> wrote:
> 2009/9/3 Colin Walters <walters@...>:
>> Though much higher priority is some PackageKit way to present just
>> things which have a .desktop file.
>
> We've already got that, it's the GUI filter.

Oh cool!  Can you tell me how widely that's deployed?  It doesn't seem
to have any effect on my Fedora 11 installation; I assume it requires
some additional information in the yum metadata?
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[Ted Gould]

On Thu, 2009-09-03 at 09:44 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 7:17 PM, Sandy
> Armstrong<sanfordarmstrong@...> wrote:
> >
> > Assuming gnome-panel (and therefore panel applets) go away in GNOME
> > 2.30, do you have a plan for integrating GlobalMenu in gnome-shell?
>
> The design for 3 is currently that application-global actions go in
> the application menu area, while document or window-specific ones
> remain in the window.

So, I'm a bit confused by this separation.  Does that mean "File->Open"
would go in the application-global area (it doesn't work on a document
or window) but then "File->Close" would go in the window?  How are you
planning on making this distinction on existing applications?

                --Ted



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[Colin Walters]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 1:59 PM, Ted Gould<ted@...> wrote:
>
> So, I'm a bit confused by this separation.  Does that mean "File->Open"
> would go in the application-global area (it doesn't work on a document
> or window) but then "File->Close" would go in the window?  How are you
> planning on making this distinction on existing applications?

For the near term (2.28) timeframe we're not planning on changing any
applications (and in general, we've been trying to minimize
application changes for compatibility reasons and for simple
manpower/scope reasons).  But by 2.30 we should have an API for
applications to manipulate the menu; how Open/Close sort out would
need some guidelining by then.
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[Davyd Madeley]

On Thu, 2009-09-03 at 15:44 +0200, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 3:39 PM, Ted Gould<ted@...> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2009-09-03 at 12:58 +0200, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
> >> Unless you ever want to use an MPX-enabled X server of course ;)
> > I don't understand.  Why is MPX incompatible with Global Menu?
>
> As Xi2/MPX allows you to have one focus per input including being able
> to focus two windows at a time (each with its own menu bar).

Similarly, it breaks with simple focus-follows-mouse.

--d

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http://www.davyd.id.au/
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[Richard Hughes-6]

2009/9/3 Colin Walters <walters@...>:
> Oh cool!  Can you tell me how widely that's deployed?  It doesn't seem
> to have any effect on my Fedora 11 installation; I assume it requires
> some additional information in the yum metadata?

No, it's all in place on F11 and F12. We don't seem to use it much in
the desktop clients, but you can see it working using pkcon:

[hughsie@hughsie-laptop src]$ pkcon search name power-manager --filter=none
installed   gnome-power-manager-2.27.92-1.226.20090902git.fc12 GNOME
Power Manager
installed   gnome-power-manager-debuginfo-2.27.92-1.226.20090902git.fc12 Debug
information for package gnome-power-manager
available   xfce4-power-manager-0.8.3.1-1.fc12       Power management
for the Xfce desktop environment
available   xfce4-power-manager-debuginfo-0.8.3.1-1.fc12 Debug
information for package xfce4-power-manager

[hughsie@hughsie-laptop src]$ pkcon search name power-manager --filter=gui
installed   gnome-power-manager-2.27.92-1.226.20090902git.fc12 GNOME
Power Manager
available   xfce4-power-manager-0.8.3.1-1.fc12       Power management
for the Xfce desktop environment

Richard.
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[Pierre Slamich]

Hi all,

Sorry first for the delay in responding. We've been discussing the concerns raised on the list, and we've tried our best to address them in a synthetic way. Here are a couple of thoughts and remarks that respond to Colin, Sandy and other people's comments and clarify a few things.

Responses:

1. Global Menu can help the transition from GNOME2 to GNOME 3 by giving people the chance to experiment with the 'application menu on the top panel' mode in GNOME2, if enabled by default in 2.28 or 2.30 (if 2.30 is already GNOME 3 with gnome shell, then enable it/pull it in for gnome-panel).

The current behavior of GlobalMenu's applet, with all menu items listed in a row, does look different from Gnome Shell's application item. There is already an submitted issue [1] suggesting to merge all items into one popup submenu, as outlined in Gnome Shell's design document, and we can work on it.

[1]http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/issues/detail?id=491

One may argue that it is still different from Gnome Shell's model of 'separated application menu and document menu' but that's already the best we can do with the current information we can obtain from the applications.

2. Please don't consider Global Menu as merely a gnome-panel applet. From a non-techie user's point of view, the most spectacular component of Global Menu is the panel applet. It does lead to confusions, e.g. on the 'GNOME Files' site Global Menu was added under the applet category. However we would like to state here that Global Menu also comes with a GTK module that detects and interpolates the menu bar in any windows, which is even more important than the panel applet. Global Menu doesn't fit into the 'Yet another panel applet' category: even if there is an Applet 'Marketplace', it is difficult to fit Global Menu into the list as with merely the applet, Global Menu won't work.

3. The other aspect of complementing GNOME 3 (other than point 1) is that it is possible to extend GNOME Shell to understand Global Menu's protocol, and translate it into Gnome Shell's application item protocol. Then, by enabling the GTK module, all legacy applications will automatically move their menu bar into the application item, as a submenu; which may be the intended behavior or not, depending on how the application works. But still, it is not worse than doing nothing.
And it is still questionable whether the benefits of this integration are worth the effort, therefore no development in this direction has been made so far. Opinions from the GNOME Shell developers are most welcomed.

4.If Global Menu is added as a module, we are not clear yet with regard to whether the applet should be enabled by default. Both options have advantages and disadvantages:

a) on by default:
GOOD: helping people from moving GNOME-PANEL to GNOME-SHELL,
BAD: significantly change GNOME2's behavior.

b) off by default:
GOOD: do not change GNOME2's behavior.
BAD: nobody knows there is a new global menu module.

What do you think about it ?

Sincerely,

Yu and Pierre, on behalf of the GlobalMenu Team

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[Jud Craft]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 12:41 PM, Pierre Slamich wrote:
> The current behavior of GlobalMenu's applet, with all menu items listed in a
> row, does look different from Gnome Shell's application item. There is
> already an submitted issue [1] suggesting to merge all items into one popup
> submenu, as outlined in Gnome Shell's design document, and we can work on
> it.
>
> [1]http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/issues/detail?id=491

Is it actually possible to integrate a new menu into GNOME panel's
Application Menu applet?

It would be nice, for example, if "User Switching Menu" and "Window
Menu" were integrated as well (so you could access all panel menus by
the same keyboard shortcut), but that hasn't happened, so I assumed
that the Application Menu just wasn't an extensible design.
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[Yu Feng-3]

On Fri, 2009-09-25 at 07:51 -0400, Jud Craft wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 12:41 PM, Pierre Slamich wrote:
> > The current behavior of GlobalMenu's applet, with all menu items listed in a
> > row, does look different from Gnome Shell's application item. There is
> > already an submitted issue [1] suggesting to merge all items into one popup
> > submenu, as outlined in Gnome Shell's design document, and we can work on
> > it.
> >
> > [1]http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/issues/detail?id=491
>
> Is it actually possible to integrate a new menu into GNOME panel's
> Application Menu applet?

A full integration is impossible unless gnome-panel is modified.
>
> It would be nice, for example, if "User Switching Menu" and "Window
> Menu" were integrated as well (so you could access all panel menus by
> the same keyboard shortcut), but that hasn't happened, so I assumed
> that the Application Menu just wasn't an extensible design.

What I was planning to implement is the 'place beside' solution
mentioned in the second paragraph. At this point I believe patching
gnome-panel for this new behavior is already meaningless, since the
panel is going to fade away in GNOME 3.


Yu

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[Andre Klapper]

Am Donnerstag, den 03.09.2009, 00:40 +0200 schrieb Pierre Slamich:
> This is a proposal on behalf of the GlobalMenu developers for its
> inclusion either in gnome-applets or as a dependency of GNOME.


The GNOME release-team will soon decide about module inclusions for
GNOME 2.30.

To the GNOME developers:
If you have not commented yet, if there is anything to add, if you have
questions to the maintainer: Please comment now.

To the maintainers who have proposed a module or a new dependency:
If there have been changes/improvements/fixes compared to when this
module was proposed: Mention them.
Also see http://live.gnome.org/ReleasePlanning/ModuleProposing again.

andre
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