On Wed, Jan 23, 2002 at 09:32:02PM -0600, Chris Cheney wrote: > I noticed there is a Desktop Entry Standard that is used in Gnome > (2.0?) and KDE. It looks like it could be very useful as a replacement > for Debian's current menu system and is not distribution specific. This is a good thing, however there is a technical flaw inherent in your suggestion which must be resolved first. Debian menu entries support a needs field which can take several standard (and a few specialized) values which .desktop files just don't provide. The standard ones Debian uses are: X11 - obvious text - runs fine in a *term vc - can't run from *term (fte, fonter, svgalib apps) wm - starts another window manager Some window managers such as fvwm, afterstep, etc have their own custom needs types used by their plugin modules. These are not standard and lintian does complain so, but unsupported needs types are simply ignored, so it works out to be a good way to handle those things in a dynamic way. The closest you get to this in a .desktop file is a toggle for running the application in a *term or not. Unless gnome-terminal has been updated to properly support xterm's options without gnome-terminal.wrapper (a shell script which does some argument translation for the x-terminal-emulator alternative), the terminal arguments entry is totally bogus anyway. I don't use KDE, so I don't know if their terminal uses standard xterm args or not. If these issues can be addressed, I would wholeheartedly support unifying the Debian, Gnome, and KDE menu systems since it would be better for everyone in the end. For the time being though, the .desktop format is simply missing this important feature found in our current menu system. The Debian menu system is a disorganized mess currently missing a great many applications and including some which just aren't very useful to have there. Of course , there's also the issue of menu hints, but I think the trade for a standard, unified, and supported menu format across everything is probably worth more to us than having the menu system dynamically rewrite the menu structure. IIRC that feature is disabled by default anyway because it is as likely to confuse as benefit a new user. -- Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@bluecherry.net> Here we go again * Caytln slaps Lisa <Caytln> catfight :P <LisaHere> Watch it girl, I like that. <LisaHere> :) <Caytln> figures :D
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