Re: .desktop file handling

[Marco Pesenti Gritti <mpgritti gmail com>]

On Sun, 06 Feb 2005 17:34:41 +0000, Crispin Flowerday
<gnome flowerday cx> wrote:
> [ 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.

Hi,

I think libgnome-desktop is not supposed to be public API. From the README:

"The package contains the libgnome-desktop library
which contains APIs that really belong in libgnome[ui] but
have not seen enough testing or development to be considered
stable. Use at your own risk."
 
> 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).

In both cases the problem is that gnome-vfs cannot depend on gtk.
There are vague plans of a libgnomevfsui library for other things...
that could be a good place to put launch with notification/icon apis
too.

Out of curiosity can you explain the use case of the icon api?

Marco