Re: Application names

[William Jon McCann <william jon mccann gmail com>]

Hi,

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 5:12 AM, Vincent Untz<vuntz gnome org> wrote:
> Le samedi 08 août 2009, à 17:51 -0400, William Jon McCann a écrit :
>> On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 5:34 PM, Frederic Peters<fpeters gnome org> wrote:
>> > However for compatibility reasons, I have been interested by Colin
>> > Walters comments:
>> >
>> >  | If we change the Name field now, concretely it will be a huge pain for
>> >  | application writers because if their app is used on older GNOME
>> >  | releases it will fail.
>>
>> Last I talked to Colin he was satisfied after he updated my patch in
>> bugzilla for the panel.  I think he was overstating the problem a bit
>> though.  The point is we have to fix the names for the shell, for KDE
>> compatibility, and to honor the spec.  Any apps that honored the spec
>> will be fine, and any apps that followed our unwise advice to make
>> Name use Name+GenericName are fixed by Colin's latest patch.
>
> Two questions:
>
>  + unless I missed something, Colin's patch is for gnome-panel only.
>   What about "Open With", and all the other places where we display the
>   applications?

An excellent point.  And we should probably consider each of these
individually.  It is a little strange that we are designing FullName
proposal around the implementation details of gnome-panel.  There are
at least two cases for open with.  We have menu entries in context
menus on files and we have the full "Open With" dialog.  My thinking
currently is that "open with" menu should simply use the Name.  Since:
  * The default handler is already set and doesn't need to be discovered
  * If you are looking for a specific app you know the name
  * We don't show the comment either (which is really essential for
discovery) since we assume you recognize the name already
  * If you don't find it there you can go into the dialog for for discovery

The "Open With" dialog is another story and has a number of design
problems.  Won't go into those here.

Technically, if we follow the logic of FullName (which is really just
the gnome-panel name) we should also add a OpenWithLabel to the
desktop file or have translatable "actions" since the following is
also wrong:
g_strdup_printf (_("Open with %s"), g_app_info_get_name (application));

Right?  Unless we don't consider names to be translated or require
articles or the resulting string to be a proper sentence.

>  + translators have stated that it's wrong to do "Name - GenericName"
>   programmatically. So, hrm, why would we not listen to them?

That hasn't been established.  In the xdg-list thread one of the last
comments from Christian Rose said this:
"Webbläsare - Epiphany" or "Webbläsare (Epiphany)" is not wrong per
se, it's just bad language style."

And I'm not convinced that it is bad style either.  At least, it isn't
in English.  Here's my reasoning.  We aren't trying to combine two
strings into a single grammatical unit.  That would be wrong.  What we
are trying to do is use a one line equivalent of "%s\n%s" by using
punctuation.   Where punctuation and the order would be decided by the
translator.  The reason for this is that we aren't trying to make a
name, we are trying to display *both names* at the same time.  It is
only for simultaneous display.  GenericName is not a category or a
description - it is a substitute for the Name.  However, in some cases
it had been used as a descriptive crutch in order to work around
really bad application names.

The specific implementation choices of gnome-panel do require us to
display more than just the Name for many apps.  This is primarily
because menus are not a good interface for discovery.  We are solving
this with GNOME Shell.  And we need to fix the Name field for 2.28 in
order to do so.

Thanks,
Jon