Re: FEATURE: Icon Resource in application binaries

[Mike Hearn <mike navi cx>]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2004 10:25:05 +0200, y9toi7y02 wrote:
> How about a user who installs firefox from the tarballs? 

Firefox (a) comes with a GTK based installer these days and (b) is
launched from a script anyway which couldn't have an embedded icon (or not
easily).

> There's no installer (or at least the wasn't one last time I tried) 

There is now :)

> so there is no menu entry.

Though you are right here, there is still no menu entry. That's just a
firefox bug though. Their upstream package kind of sucks (they don't have
a wrapper script to trigger new windows either) but they seem sluggish
about fixing it.

> Also the trend is to not provide menu items for a lot of
> applications because otherwise the menu is too cluttered.

It is? I've not noticed any such trend, nearly all the apps I install
these days come with menu entries. Where they don't it's usually just a
bug. If you install a ton of apps I don't think there is any way around
having cluttered menus, Windows users often have menus that span half the
screen because they install so much stuff.

Certainly, replacing the menu with the filing system doesn't really reduce
clutter. It just makes it less convenient to run programs.

> Real users sometimes need to do something the developers didn't think of.
> Should gnome make it that hard to do it?

I guess I'm not a real user then, as I never needed to do this. And anyway
it's not "hard to do", running these programs directly works pretty well
(modulo the annoying script mimetype bug which I think is not yet fixed),
they just don't have icons.

Basically I think if the user is directly interacting with ELF binaries
something has gone wrong somewhere ... mostly today when a user runs a
program directly it's usually a script anyway as that's what proprietary
software vendors use to set env vars and stuff.

thanks -mike