RE: "proprietary" vs. polluting (was Re: propriatary question)

["Tuomas J. Lukka" <lukka fas harvard edu>]

On Fri, 2 Apr 1999, Gleef wrote:
> On Fri, 2 Apr 1999, Fox, Kevin M wrote:
> > Point, and No point.... :)
> > 
> > What happens if, hmm.. lets say star office, wants to create a program...
> > 
> > they want one desktop file
> > 
> > lets call it office.desktop. (who cares about the real name)
> > 
> > where should they put it?   with kde?   with gnome?  with enlightenment?
> > With what?
> 
> They have three choices (that I can see):
> 
>   * They can put it in their own directory, and count on whatever
>     desktop/user to use it however they want, the office program isn't
>     going to worry about it.
> 
>   * They can ask the user where to put it at install time.  
> 
>   * They can attempt to autodetect the existance of the environments
>     they want to actively support, and put them in the approprate
>     places for the detected environemtns.

No, none of these are *really* satisfactory. What Gnome should do is
to actively look at the /usr/share stuff for KDE and all other
possibilities and prompt the user if it sees something new has been
installed there at next startup (or a explicit reload command).

Not having icons come automatically for apps was one of the major
concerns of a reviewer and you can understand that - when someone
is not familiar with the computer, how are they supposed to know
how to put them there? They should just work.

	Tuomas