Re: SoC idea: desktop file cache

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Sat, 2011-03-26 at 03:11 +0530, Nirbheek Chauhan wrote:
<snip>
> I was thinking that this is the kind of problem that has cross-desktop
> implications, and so I wondered how KDE solves this problem. We should
> probably take their feedback on this?
> 
> On the other hand, I think there is a way to do this in a
> cross-desktop fashion with existing infrastructure as well.
> 
> We already have `update-desktop-database` for updating the MimeType
> cache from desktop files, and that's supposed to be run after any new
> .desktop files are added to $XDG_DATA_DIRS/applications, so I was
> wondering if caches for the other properties could also be generated
> by the same tool at the same time?

I wouldn't want the code to live in update-desktop-database (which is in
shared-mime-info), but we can certainly add support for launching
scripts in a specific directory whenever it's called.

Note that update-desktop-database is probably not called by packaging
managers or application's Makefiles when they don't handle mime-types,
so this would be something that would need to be announced, and followed
by distributions.

Cheers