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

[Owen Taylor]

On Fri, 2007-06-01 at 11:32 +0000, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Owen Taylor <otaylor <at> redhat.com> writes:
> > Maybe carefully omitting the GenericName field from the desktop files
> > where it doesn't provide information we want in the menus would work.
> 
> It would.
> 
> I'd argue about the Iagno case though, saying it's a board game does provide 
> information. In KDE, there's a "board games" submenu, but 1. I don't believe 
> GNOME has that and 2. Iagno isn't even currently in there AFAICS, that would 
> need adding some X-KDE-* category to the list of categories

My tendency is to think about application browsing in terms of tasks:

 - Find an application to fit some role
 - Find an application you've used before
 - Find an interesting application/game to waste time with

I don't really think that "Board Game" adds a lot for Iagno for any of
those categories. 

(Iagno is actually a bad example, since "Reversi" would be a pretty
useful generic name, even if people are most familiar with Reversi by a
different trademarked name... but most stuff in the games menu can't be
usefully described in a couple of words, beyond "Game")

Now, in a context where extra information can be added without breaking
up the reading flow ... like the bigboard arrangement of:

 Iagno
 Board Game

(With "Board Game" in a lighter color), then even minimal information is
a win. But in the standard menu arrangement, I think you lose quite
a bit if you make people parse "Iagno Board Game" when they are looking
for "Iagno". 

>  (shall we start 
> filing RFEs asking to add those categories to the desktop files where it makes 
> sense? It wouldn't break anything for GNOME and it would make KDE look more 
> organized).

That's really probably best done upstream, rather than in every
distribution. I suspect a RFE to add X-KDE categories to the upstream
gnome-games desktop files would almost certainly be accepted.

> > But is that an improvement from the current situation?
> 
> IMHO yes, because that would at least make 3 out of the 4 settings look right 
> (Name only, Name and GenericName, GenericName and Name), only the "GenericName 
> only" setting would look bad (it would use Name instead).
> 
> Maybe the best solution would be to have a boolean which says whether the 
> GenericName is useful in the presence of Name or only as a replacement for 
> Name, but supporting that needs patching in both KDE and GNOME.

A consideration here is what best reduces the difference in translatable
strings between Fedora and upstream GNOME and KDE. If we have to make
changes in the Fedora desktop files of any sort, a boolean or similar
certainly causes less translator problems than modifying existing
fields.

I don't actually have a good sense of what the upstream GNOME .desktop
files look like these days.
					- Owen