Re: Window managers and their desktop files

[Dan Winship <danw gnome org>]

Thomas Thurman wrote:
> The .desktop files in "wm-properties" are not very much like the desktop 
> files in "applications".  There was a lot of discussion about this on 
> <http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=549479>. "wm-properties" 
> files MUST contain a group called "Window Manager", and "applications" 
> files MUST NOT.

I don't know who told you that "MUST NOT", but it's wrong. The Desktop
Entry spec says:

    The basic format of the desktop entry file requires that there be a
    group header named Desktop Entry. There may be other groups present
    in the file... There should be nothing preceding [the Desktop Entry]
    group in the desktop entry file but possibly one or more comments.

If there are apps that fail when a "Window Manager" group is present
after the "Desktop Entry" group, then those apps are broken.

> But perhaps someone has a plan for this already.

I think most people who spend a lot of time thinking about it eventually
come to the conclusion that we want a .desktop file database/cache like
we do with icons, which would contain all of the various sorts of
desktop files ($XDG_DATA_DIRS/applications, $XDG_DATA_DIRS/autostart,
wm-properties, etc) in one place. But I don't think anyone is working on it.

-- Dan