Re: Common server activation

[Havoc Pennington <rhp zirx pair com>]

On Sun, 27 Jun 1999, Cristian Tibirna wrote:
> On Sun, 27 Jun 1999, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> 
> > Sticking every bit of information you need in a .desktop file is
> > broken.  
> 
> Please, be so kind and explain why.
> 

We considered this at some length for the Gnome solution. IIRC the reason
is simply that .desktop files are for menu entries and icons; this goal
does not correspond one-to-one with what you want for activation. That is,
there are servers that certainly don't need an icon, and executables that
implement lots of different servers, etc.

All combining them does is make things more confusing (because you have
two different pieces of functionality in the same object). We wanted to
avoid adding more and more stuff to the .desktop files.

It just seems a bit cleaner to keep separate records for the object stuff.
Consider for a moment as well that we want to store object information for
non-desktop applications and servers; then it makes even more sense.

And our file managers should be able to do something sensible with these
files; if some are menu entries, some are CORBA object descriptions, and
some are both, that complicates its job.

I'm sure I don't remember the entire argument though.

Havoc