[Fedora-packaging] some comments on the desktop files section and proposed amendmends

Matthias Clasen mclasen at redhat.com
Thu Feb 8 03:18:19 UTC 2007


 > If a package contains a GUI application, then it needs to also 
include a properly installed .desktop file. For the purposes
 > of these guidelines, a GUI application is defined as any application 
which draws an X window and runs from within that
 > window.

This is just not right. xeyes draws an X window - do you want a desktop 
file for it ?! xev draws an X window, too.
nautilus is certainly a GUI application - do you want to see it in the 
menus ? On the other hand, I can easily imagine
non-GUI applications that may deserve a place on the menus.

IMO this whole sentence should be nuked and replaced by something like:

If a package contains an application that users would expect to find in 
the panel menus, it needs to include a properly
installed .desktop file.

 > Installed .desktop files MUST follow the [[WWW] desktop-entry-spec 
<http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/desktop-entry-spec-latest.html>], 
paying particular attention to validating correct usage
 > of Name, GenericName <http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/GenericName>, 
[[WWW] Categories 
<http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/apa.html>], [[WWW] 
StartupNotify 
<http://www.freedesktop.org/Standards/startup-notification-spec>] entries.

A number of comments on this:

1) The desktop-entry-spec doesn't acutally define correct usage of Name 
and GenericName, all it does is giving a single
 example of how you could use these fields.

2) While I can see where this is coming from, and may even sympathize 
with a "correct usage" of Name and GenericName,
simply decreeing that it has to be so is not going to make it happen. 
Packagers really cannot do anything to enforce
"correct usage", because doing so would require them to speak all the 
40+ languages in which these locale strings are
typically translated.

Finally, I think it would be beneficial to mention nimetypes and 
update-desktop-database in this section.




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