2001-01-01
							Emil Brink

			Menus in gentoo

	WARNING: (this is incomplete: don't read it!)


1. INTRODUCTION
This little document contains some thoughts about how menus are
handled in gentoo. It was created for version 0.11.16, which is
the first version of gentoo to include user-configurable menus.

This document serves two purposes: it provides a place for me
to organize my thoughts about the menu implementation, and it
hopefully makes it easier to understand why the menus in gentoo
work as they do.


2. THE ORIGINAL MENU MODEL
My original plan for the menu system were to implement a simple,
yet flexible and pretty general solution. In that original model,
a "menu" is a named list of menu items. An item is either a
simple labeled command envocation, or a submenu.

There are two ways in which a menu is made available in the user
interface: it can be attached to a command button, in which case
right-clicking the button opens up the menu. A menu can also be
opened through the legacy MenuPopup command, which takes the name
of a menu and pops it up under the mouse pointer.

2.1 The Problem With the Original Model
The problem created by the model described above is that is easy
to use the same menu in several places; for example, one could
attach a menu to a button, and then run a MenuPopup command on
the very same menu. A menu must be mapped onto a GtkWidget data
structure for GTK+ to handle, and then the issue of ownership
enters the equation.

3. THE SOLUTION
Um, it's in the code.