Re: backwards compatible .desktop files

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

George <jirka 5z com> writes:

> On Fri, Jan 18, 2002 at 03:44:12PM -0500, jacob berkman wrote:
> > On Fri, 2002-01-18 at 16:00, George wrote:
> > > On Fri, Jan 18, 2002 at 02:31:39PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > > > > some applications are starting to install .desktop files in
> > > > > $(datadir)/applications, where the 1.4 panel will not find them.
> > > > > 
> > > > > is there any reason not to install into both places?
> > > > 
> > > > IMO that makes a lot of sense.
> > > 
> > > In any case, another issue is translations.  We now really want things in
> > > UTF-8 (else it slows down some stuff by forcing us to convert to utf8).  Also
> > > I assume all translations are done in utf-8 in gnome2, so anything using
> > > intltool will also have the .desktop files in utf8, and this just won't work
> > > for 1.4 panel.
> > 
> > i thought a newer gnome-libs could handle UTF-8?
> 
> We can read it correctly, but we can't display it.  Which is the problem.
> Try looking at localized KDE menus.  Basically unless you're in a country
> using plain ascii, you're screwed then.

Some distributions have had patches in them for a while to handle UTF-8;
it's hard to do this portably without pulling in pretty big framework
(a good chunk of GLib2), but I think that Kjartan has this code in
the latest gnome-libs stable release, conditionalized to at least work
on Linux/Glibc.

(You don't have to display arbitrary UTF-8, just UTF-8 for the current locale,
which is a lot easier.)

Regards,
                                        Owen