Re: New desktop-file-utils release

[Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>]

Le lundi 04 juin 2007, à 19:10 -0400, Matthias Clasen a écrit :
> On Tue, 2007-06-05 at 01:09 +0200, Vincent Untz wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > (I'm not sending this to gnome-announce-list, since I'd like to get
> > attention of downstream packagers :-))
> > 
> > I made a new release of desktop-file-utils, available at
> > http://people.freedesktop.org/~vuntz/ for now (I don't have write access
> > to http://www.freedesktop.org/software/desktop-file-utils/releases/ but
> > as soon as I'll get it, it'll be uploaded there).
> > 
> > This release features a rewritten-from-scratch desktop file validator.
> > It should work better, and it has been updated for the last version of
> > the desktop entry spec. However, since it's been rewritten, it's
> > likely that new bugs have been introduced.
> 
> Who rewrote it, and why was a rewrite necessary ?

I did, because the code was using GnomeDesktopItem, which is not
actively maintained anymore and which accepts files that are not valid.
The last point is okay for users of GnomeDesktopItem, but not for a
validator which should be strict.

Also, the new validator does more checks than the old one, warns you
about usage of deprecated keys, and it's quite easier to add checks for
new keys.

Eg, with my current /usr/share/applications:
 + old desktop-file-validate outputs 31 errors (some errors are wrong,
   like requiring the Encoding key) and 80 warnings (most of
   the warning are about usage of the Application category)
 + new desktop-file-validate outputs 72 errors, 8 warnings and 239
   warnings about usage of deprecated things

Note that it didn't start as a rewrite: I first started updating the
validator to the latest version of the spec, and adding warnings about
usage of deprecated keys. But those changes, and the port away from
GnomeDesktopItem, resulted in new internals for the validator.

Vincent

-- 
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