Re: Icons of program

[Toshio Kuratomi <badger prtr-13 ucsc edu>]

On Wed, 22 Apr, 1998 at 04:16:00PM -0500, robert havoc pennington set free these words:
> 
> On Wed, 22 Apr 1998, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> >   - invasive procedure.  This puts file metadata everywhere in my filesystem
> >     (and no easy way for me to get rid of it.)
> >   - Breaks the UNIX convention of bin holding programs, etc holding system
> >     configuration, etc.
> >   - There is no way to turn this feature off!  (meaning with any of the
> >     others, I can ignore the existance of the metadata and everything will be
> >     fine.  With this one the metadata is sitting there in the directory so I'm
> >     forced to look at it whether I use it or not.  If I remove all the
> 
> I don't think this has to be true.
> 
> .desktop files should be versatile enough to be either associated with a
> file in the same directory, or "links," "shortcuts," "aliases," whatever. 
> 
> That means you can use them as metainfo (in essence, links to files in the
> same directory, but the file manager doesn't bother to show the real
> files); or you can use them as share/apps/ is used now, just a tree of
> links to common applications or data or directories or whatever.
> 
> I don't think .desktop files should ever go in the main Unix system
> directories; yuck. Just have a tree of aliases like share/apps.
> Though if people optionally want to put them there, no reason to prohibit
> it. (However, if you're not running as root I don't see how they'd get
> there.) Most of what's in the system directories isn't relevant to desktop
> activities, and when it is an on-the-fly guess at an icon will do.
> 
Exactly!  Double yuck!  I don't think I have a problem with the
share/apps hierarchy -- but it's totally separate from the idea of putting
.desktop files in the system directories.  I'd almost go so far as to say that
was just plain outright wrong.

> 
> Do you still object to .desktop files if they aren't strewn all over the
> system with no way to turn it off?
> 
That should be okay. (Or at least, we could live together -- whether we talked
much depends on how well designed the .desktp files were :-)

-Toshio
-- 
badger  \"The Difference between today and yesterday is not so much what has
@prtr-13 \ changed between then and now as what I hope to change by tomorrow."
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