Hello there, This is a request to register a "Main" desktop Category: Electronics so that it becomes a standard defined by http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/apa.html Name: Electronics Description : Electronics design and simulation software, e.g. a circuit designer Notes: (none) For nearly 3 years, Fedora is also striving to provide an advanced electronic design and simulation platform for electronic hardware development under the name of "Fedora Electronic Lab". In short we provide opensource solutions for people to develop from IC chips to a final product e.g openmoko smartphone. http://chitlesh.fedorapeople.org/FEL I'm writing you this email on behalf of all upstream projects we are working with so that we all can deliver an unified and standard set of guidelines for other linux distributions, not only for Fedora. Problems we have WITHOUT this electronics main category: * The software we are providing do not fall under "Education" freedesktop MAIN category but fall into an advanced engineering category not yet defined by the freedesktop standard. At the same time, we don't want to mix software for Electronic Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, thus category "Engineering" isn't appropriate for a long term solution. * An unified and standard set of guidelines for all linux distributions and developers. * There are a lot of electronic "design flows". Each design flow contains various set of software. If all the software for electronic design falls into various categories, it does not give any linux distribution the proper credentials and value of their solutions. Opensource solutions are there but lost inside the bag. * No Compatibility across various desktop environments: KDE, gnome, XFCE, LXDE,... We are hoping that if this "Electronics" main category is approved, packagers of various distributions and developers will add Categories=Electronics; to their desktop files. In order not to drown other users into complexity, one of the gEDA developers came up with a small package called "electronics-menu" http://geda.seul.org/dist/electronics-menu-1.0.tar.gz which provides a "Electronics" menu as described by the RED arrow : http://chitlesh.fedorapeople.org/images/electronic-menu.png Please accept the icon provided http://geda.seul.org/dist/electronics-menu-1.0.tar.gz. On Fedora, we have tuned our GUI electronics software's desktop files so that they support this "Electronics" main category. I was told that even debian is opting for this type of menu category. As you can see on this page: http://chitlesh.fedorapeople.org/FEL/list.html we have quite a handful set of GUI for electronic design. That said, other electronic solutions are also mixed and confuses a lot of users as they (newbies) can't distinguish the software set they need for their respective design flow (analog, digital, mixed signal, embedded). Hence, I've added submenu support to the http://geda.seul.org/dist/electronics-menu-1.0.tar.gz as described by the YELLOW arrow. However, we are still under discussion about the proper subcategory naming. Thus please leave these additional categories for a later discussion. http://chitlesh.fedorapeople.org/images/electronic-menu.png Kind regards, Chitlesh Goorah _______________________________________________ Fedora-electronic-lab-list mailing list Fedora-electronic-lab-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-electronic-lab-list
