Debian Menu System - chapter 1
Introduction

Each package includes a file /usr/lib/menu/package-name. In this file, it will have one line per menu-entry, like this (copied from /usr/lib/menu/xbase):
   ?package(xbase):command="/usr/bin/X11/xedit" icon="none" needs="X11" \
                section="Apps/Editors" title="Xedit"
This describes the type of interface the package needs (X11), the menu section the menu entry should be in, possibly an icon, the menu text, and the command that should be exectued.

Whenever root runs update-menus, it will check all new or changed menufiles in /etc/menu and /usr/lib/menu, and run the installation scripts that display managers like fvwm2 should provide in /etc/menu-methods.

The menu package itself provides a set of default menu files, for people to get the idea, and to speed up things a bit. (These files should be incorporated into the package.)

Note, that substantial changes took place with the menu-1.0 release. This document describes menu-1.0. Most notible changes to previous revisions are listed in the file README.changes in the menu package. To convert old menu entry files to the new format, you may use /usr/bin/convert-menuentry (though for users it certainly isn't necessary to do so).


Debian Menu System - Copyright ©1997 Joost Witteveen, Joey Hess, Christian Schwarz.
Contents; abstract; next.
version 1.3, 26 October 1998
Joost Witteveen joostje@debian.org
Joey Hess joey@kite.ml.org
Christian Schwarz schwarz@debian.org