Re: 3rd party .desktop files

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> > 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.

I agree. The only ones I think we should have in the menus somehow that
don't seem inclined to install .desktop files themselves are...

Netscape
GIMP
and
xterm

To some small degree I'm happy that these .desktop files are under the
auspices of GNOME because it gives us the ability to edit them. For
example, I doubt GIMP would have changed its "Name=" field to match the
new functional description format put forward by the HIG. Similarly I
bet xterm would have ended up with something horrible and archane (not
that the current menu isn't, but its as little as we could make it
without making the name dumb).

-Seth