Re: 3rd party .desktop files

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Glynn Foster <glynn foster sun com> writes:
> On Wed, 2002-01-23 at 00:29, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > 
> > You could make a "desktop file authoring tool" but don't you think
> > it's overkill for a 10-line Key=value file?
> 
> Not if there's no man page for the format ;)
>

It's fully documented: http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/desktop-entry-spec.html

> > Anyhow I thought they were just supposed to install them wherever
> > desktop files go. Though I think it might be sensible to support a
> > separate location for OS-supplied .desktop files vs. ISV .desktop
> > files, i.e. have the panel look in two directories, just to 
> > remove any hint of namespace issues.
> 
> Yeah, I was also thinking that perhaps we should namespace them
> according to which package they were in. I'm not sure if we really need
> more than one location - this kinda goes against what George was trying
> to achive with his new vfolder proposal and implementation.

They definitely need to be namespaced, even with two locations.

More than one location shouldn't impact what George is up to, the
problem being solved there is having the location affect the position
in the menu. With more than one we just merge all files found in any
location and pretend they were in a single place.

> > It's broken for gnome-core to come with .desktop files for other
> > apps. .desktop files are standard, KDE also uses them.
> 
> So, can we remove them? I think it's the right thing to do here.

I'm very much in favor of it anyway.

Havoc