.desktop file handling

[Crispin Flowerday <gnome flowerday cx>]

[ Please CC me on all replies ]

Hi,

While looking at various things with .desktop files, it seems there are
2 totally separate API's for handling them:

1) gnome-vfs: Provides mime type stuff
2) libgnome-desktop: Provides reading and writing capabilities.

This is quite confusing, as both API's offer slightly different things,
e.g. in order to display the icon for a program got from gnome-vfs, it
seems as though the best way to get the full path to the image (taking
into account icon theme etc) is to use the libgnome-desktop API.

Also if you want to launch an application using the startup-notification
stuff, you need to use libgnome-panel (although I have raised bug 166197
about gnome-vfs not using startup-notification).

So, my question is, shouldn't we just have a single API for dealing
with .desktop files?

Also shouldn't we be able to just read the icon string from a .desktop
file and pass it to gtk to display it appropriately (unfortunately it
seems as though the gtk_image_new_from_icon_name isn't good enough, due
to absolute paths, and images with and without extensions).

Crispin