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

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Thu, 2007-05-31 at 21:15 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> [ Cc: and Reply-To: fedora-desktop-list ]
> 
I think this will cause problems as I'm not on fedora-desktop-list but
here goes :-)

> On Thu, 2007-05-31 at 19:57 +0000, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > And KDE actually displays "X-Chat (IRC client)" if the user preferences are set 
> > that way. Why does GNOME _still_ not support GenericName years after this 
> > specification has been supposedly agreed on? IMHO, the real technical problem 
> > lies there, mangling .desktop files like this is just papering over the 
> > problem.
> 
> I'm not sure how you think that the Fedora GNOME desktop should be using GenericName. 
> The usage of a generic instead of a specific name in the Fedora menus is done for
> a small subset of applications: those considered to be "best of breed".

I imagine he envisions it being used like KDE's Name (Generic Name)
instead of "best of breed".

Best of breed is similar to the big board concept of "program in this
category most used by user" with an out of the box popularity determined
by the distribution.  It's information about ranking a program (as
determined by the user or users in Big Board, by the distribution in the
status quo) whereas name is information for identifying a program and
generic name is information for categorizing.

> 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". 
> 
+1

In a world where we could potentially have every OSS application in the
repository, menus are a losing proposition.  Big Board and other
alternatives to menu systems are the way forward.

-Toshio
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