Meaningless name (was: Re: rpms/xchat/devel ...)

[Stuart Children]

For the benefit of those not subscribed, I previously emailed  
fedora-devel regarding this thread: 
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-June/msg00000.html

On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 09:15:01PM -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> Now, using a generic for *anything* is really a hold-over from a past era when
> our vision of the Fedora menus was that we'd select a small set of best-of-breed apps
> for our users, instead of making them deal with the chaos of the entire set of 
> possible applications.
> 
> This no longer fits with the Fedora philosophy, especially considering the merge
> of core and extras. The question is more "how to manage the chaos". 

I agree that only displaying generic names (regardless of what .desktop 
properties that string is derived from) isn't very helpful - certainly 
as you say given how Fedora now works.

> Ideas that some of us have been working on for managing the chaos:
> 
>  - Collect statistics for the top applications in real use
>    http://mugshot.org/applications
> 
>  - Concentrate on making it easy for the user to launch the applications
>    they use most 
>    http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Image:Big_Board_and_Application_Browser.png
> 
>  - Bring together the installed applications and the available applications
>    http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Image:Big_Board_Application_Browser_-_All_Internet.png
>   
> Those mockups are a bit stale ... the real thing is better. (bigboard package in
> extras, but you might want to wait until tomorrow ... Colin has some neat stuff
> in the pipeline for setting everything up for online-desktop mode.)

These look good. I'll definitely keep an eye on bigboard.

> But you
> can see, sort of in the mockups, and more in the real thing, what we are using for 
> applications is:
> 
>  X-Chat
>  IRC Client
> 
> With a tooltip of "Chat with your friends".
> 
> (We get this from a merge of desktop files with the online Mugshot application
> database; neither GNOME nor KDE desktop files have all three of the above.
> GNOME desktop files miss the GenericName, KDE desktop files miss the tooltip.)

Yep, makes sense. So focusing purely on where we (GNOME and Fedora) want 
to go, rather than how to resolve the specifics of the X-Chat case right 
now... it would appear that we do intend to change desktop files to have 
Name and GenericName specific as in the fdo spec (values "X-Chat" and 
"IRC Client" in our example here).

So the key question is, will bigboard replace the current gnome-panel's 
application menu? It would *seem* so, but it's not entirely clear. My 
reason for asking: is it worth my time going to hack on gnome-menus 
(though maybe the library changes there are required anyway - will have 
to see what bigboard's using to read desktop entries) and gnome-panel?

The other consideration there would be the timeline for integration of 
bigboard into a GNOME/Fedora release. If there isn't currently one 
that's fine, I just want to differentiate that from me know being able 
to find it. :) The changes I was thinking of to gnome-panel could be 
done easily enough, would allow people to start "fixing" the desktop 
files right away, and prevent upsets about name display until bigboard 
is available. But maybe my efforts are better spent on bigboard?

Many thanks

-- 
Stuart Children
http://terminus.co.uk/