Singular CAS: why not in Cygwin menu?

[Jon TURNEY]

(following up to a mail to the main cygwin list)

Frédéric Bron wrote:
> Why the need to have Singular CAS outside the Cygwin menu? It makes 3
> menus for cygwin: Cygwin, Cygwin-X and Singular CAS.
> In terms of folders for people who do not have administrator
> privileges, it makes 4 folders:
> 
> - User\Start Menu\Programs\Cygwin (with only Cygwin bash shell...)
> - All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Cygwin
> - All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Cygwin-X
> - All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Singular CAS
> 
> Why not everything in one folder "Cygwin" ?
> 
> I find it a bit boring because I try to mainain 1.5 and 1.7 together
> and have to rename all folders before and after each update.

Well, it's hard to blame Singular for this, they want some shortcuts to start 
their application and we have no standard way of doing this, so they have some 
scripts to make them.

Likewise, the X-start-menu-icons package, which creates menu items for 
'common' X applications is old and hasn't been updated since modular X, for 
reasons of developer time and also because we had no good idea of what to 
replace it with.

A (unoriginal) good solution might involve some tool which uses the .desktop 
files [1] which many GUI applications come with these days, by either:

i. scanning for .desktop files in the filesystem and running mkshortcut to 
generate appropriate menu entries

If it could be arranged for that tool to run after setup has run to add/remove 
packages, even better.

It would be necessary to track which menu entries we created so we know to 
remove them when the underlying package is removed.

ii. Automate the generation of appropriate postinstall/preremove scripts 
fragments at packaging time.

For bonus points, deal with the "multiple cygwin installation" identified by 
Frédéric correctly :-)

[1] http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/

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