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

[Owen Taylor]

On Fri, 2007-06-01 at 11:02 +0100, Stuart Children wrote:

[...]

> > 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?

In "online-desktop" mode. the applications section of bigboard replaces
the menu. You have one or the other.

> 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?

The plan is definitely to have online-desktop mode there for 
Fedora 8. But will replace the current classic GNOME desktop as a main
desktop configuration? I suspect that's more of a Fedora 9 thing than
Fedora 8 thing.

So for now, I think we need to maintain the menu system. Would
GenericName support to gnome-menus help? I'm not quite sure I see how it
that would work.

While in many cases, we want the information of both name and generic
name in the menus, doing a straight Name (GenericName) is going to be
ugly because of all the parentheses. It also starts looking really
duplicative once you get into things that are more "accessories".

 Thunderbird (Email)
 Abiword (Word Processor)
 GNOME Terminal (Terminal)
 Character Map (Character Map)
 Iagno (Board Game)

Dropping the parentheses makes the accessories even worse 
"GNOME Terminal Terminal". What we'd presumably like is something like:

 Thunderbird Email
 Abiword Word Processor
 GNOME Terminal
 Character Map
 Iagno

Maybe carefully omitting the GenericName field from the desktop files
where it doesn't provide information we want in the menus would work.
But is that an improvement from the current situation?

						- Owen