gnome-shell and custom desktop files

[Aurélien Naldi <aurelien naldi gmail com>]

Hi,

I am having some trouble with the gnome-shell dock, more specifically
with the mechanism used to match windows to .desktop files. Indeed, in
gnome-shell we need a .desktop file to add an application to the
"dock" but the facility to create these files have been removed.
Arguably, most users won't need to build their own as applications (or
distributors) are supposed to provide them, yet we still have some
corner cases:

* manually installed applications: I rely on some manually installed
applications (especially java ones), which do not provide a .desktop
file. Making one is easy enough (yet I think GNOME should provide (or
reuse) a GUI for this).
Once the .desktop file exists and is installed in the proper place,
the shell can launch the application, but the dock does not associate
the window to the .desktop file. How can I solve this?

* custom options for existing applications: I use separate profiles
for gnome-terminal, firefox, google-chrome. These applications provide
a command-line switch to select the profile, but the opened window is
then associated to the "main" desktop file instead of the custom one.
I guess the source of the problem is similar to the previous one.

I am asking this not only as a user who would like to make his
everyday life slightly more confortable, but also as a developer (of
java application) who would like to improve integration with the
environment, without too much headache...

Best regards.

-- 
Aurélien Naldi