Re: Detecting GNOME

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

On Wed, 2005-07-27 at 12:02 +0100, ghee teo wrote:

>    The patch is dead simple [1]. However, its acceptance into gnome-session
> may not be that 'simple'. I remember long debates going on here before, 
> sorry
> couldn't find the thread. It was rather inconclusive then.

	I thought the previous debate[1] was rather conclusive, personally.

	My basic objection[2] was that people want something like $DESKTOP (or
an equivalent X property) in order to hack around every place where we
have made it difficult for applications developers to integrate with the
desktop.

	We could provide applications developers with a hook for hacks of this
nature, or we could actually fix the integration problems. My concern is
that if we do the former, we'll never do the latter.

	Now, go back to Tomasz's original question:

>   The app is written in python. Actually I only want to run GNOME
> browser/mailer if user runs GNOME and predefined apps if he doesn't.

	A common question for application developers, right? Do we want the
answer to that question to be "look for a GNOME_SM_PROPERTY on the root
window and do the GNOME thing if its set"? Do we want that to be the
answer to every application integration problem?

	(Hint - "yes! no! uggh, no fscking way! ")

	So, instead of a patch to add $DESKTOP to gnome-session, I'd much
prefer to see people actually go and solve these application integration
problems.

	As an example of a much more sensible way to tackling such issues,
consider Michael's effort to provide a "desktop-lauch" script which
application developers could use to display a given URI in the correct
browser:

  http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2004-August/004489.html

Cheers,
Mark.

[1] - These threads:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2004-May/thread.html#3942
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2004-May/thread.html#3995
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2004-August/thread.html#4416

[2] - http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2004-May/003954.html