Re: 3rd party .desktop files

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Glynn Foster <glynn foster sun com> writes: 
> What the heck is the story with 3rd party .desktop files? Can we really
> expect ISV's to have to manually create their .desktop file? because if
> the answer is 'yes' then that sucks and we really should be thinking
> about doing something about this for GNOME 2.0 :)

You could make a "desktop file authoring tool" but don't you think
it's overkill for a 10-line Key=value file?

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.

> A couple of us in Sun were also worried by the fact that gnome-core
> contains a bunch of conditional launchers [2]. These should be installed
> by the individual applications, and although it seems great to have the
> idea of having menu items for applications that haven't in the past
> created .desktop files, it could create potential headaches with pkg
> registries?

It's broken for gnome-core to come with .desktop files for other
apps. .desktop files are standard, KDE also uses them.

Shipping with the files for other apps just results in duplicate
entries in the menus - we have to remove these things from gnome-core
in Red Hat to avoid duplicates, because the third-party apps have
since added their own .desktop file.

Havoc