Re: [Usability] program binary names

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 13Oct2001 11:16PM (-0400), Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org> writes: 
> > You can use gnome-vfs currently to get a human-readable name for an
> > app that's described in a .application file. I'm hoping to convert to
> > using .desktop files for this at some point, especially if we can get
> > agreement with KDE. The .application file does have a couple of things
> > in it that .desktop files don't right now though.
> > 
> > We could rename the binaries as well, I just wanted to point out that
> > there is a reasonable way for prgrams to get a human-readable name for
> > error messages of this type.

Discussing the future .desktop based design is a bit premature at the
moment (as I mentioned, the current system uses .application files,
and the whole database gets loaded on demand which works OK because
gnome-vfs provides a big honkin' .application file that covers most
apps) but...
 
> How do you do this without opening every last .desktop file?

If we used .desktop files for this we'd probably need a caching daemon
for this info like KDE. 
 
> Should we establish some convention, like "desktop files must be named
> after the binary in their Exec= field"?

I don't think that's desirable or necessary.

> What about apps that have a number of desktop files, for different
> parts of the app? How do you know which one applies?

I don't know what does that so it's hard for me to say. In my proposed
idea of using .desktop files for this purpose, the set of .desktop
files that forms the app registry may not be exactly the same as the
set that makes up the panel menus and default launchers.

> Maybe a special field in .desktop files to indicate the "master" file
> for a given argv[0]?

That's one possible way of distinguishing the files, I was thinking we
could use installation directory to tell apart the .desktop files that
comprise the app registry from the ones that comprise the panel menus.

 - Maciej


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