RE: "proprietary" vs. polluting (was Re: propriatary question)

[Gleef <gleef capital net>]

On Sat, 3 Apr 1999, Tuomas J. Lukka wrote:
> On Fri, 2 Apr 1999, Gleef wrote:
> > On Fri, 2 Apr 1999, Fox, Kevin M wrote:
> > > Point, and No point.... :)
> > > 
> > > What happens if, hmm.. lets say star office, wants to create a program...
> > > 
> > > they want one desktop file
> > > 
> > > lets call it office.desktop. (who cares about the real name)
> > > 
> > > where should they put it?   with kde?   with gnome?  with enlightenment?
> > > With what?
> > 
> > They have three choices (that I can see):
> > 
> >   * They can put it in their own directory, and count on whatever
> >     desktop/user to use it however they want, the office program isn't
> >     going to worry about it.
> > 
> >   * They can ask the user where to put it at install time.  
> > 
> >   * They can attempt to autodetect the existance of the environments
> >     they want to actively support, and put them in the approprate
> >     places for the detected environemtns.
> 
> No, none of these are *really* satisfactory. What Gnome should do is
> to actively look at the /usr/share stuff for KDE and all other
> possibilities and prompt the user if it sees something new has been
> installed there at next startup (or a explicit reload command).

That's one of the things I was suggesting in the first option.  The
desktop can worry about it.  Currently, GNOME doesn't do this, but it can.
I might start working on something to do this, if nobody does it first.


> Not having icons come automatically for apps was one of the major
> concerns of a reviewer and you can understand that - when someone
> is not familiar with the computer, how are they supposed to know
> how to put them there? They should just work.

Keep in mind that I was arguing against the point raised that we should
keep all our .desktop files in "/usr/share/apps".  Keep in mind that many
(perhaps most) GNOME installations don't have "/usr" as a prefix.  Many
use "/usr/local" (the default for tarballs), "/opt/gnome", "/usr/gnome",
"/home/gnome", "~/gnome" or whatever crossed their mind at the time as
the right place for it to go on their system. 

Even if GNOME changes back to using "$prefix/share/apps" for its desktop
files, any developer that assumes that "/usr/share/apps" would be the
right place to put their stuff would be in for a rude awakening.

-Gleef