Re: Debian packages and freedesktop.org (Gnome, KDE, etc) menu entries

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Scripsit Andrew Suffield <asuffield@debian.org>
> On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 08:05:34PM +0000, Henning Makholm wrote:

> >   Step 2: Packagers can now chose to supply .desktop files instead of
> >      the Debian format, with a versioned dependency on menu.

> I can see no reason to proceed any further than this.

As far as I read this thread, the .desktop format is supposed to be
able to encode more information and have better i18n than the
Debian-native format.  The underlying idea would be to reap the
benefit of these capabilities for all packages with menu entries.

There's basically two ways to do this: Migrate to .desktop or enhance
the existing format. My sketch depicted the former.

The idea of migration would seem to have the benefit of being directly
compatible with the stuff non-Debian people produce. Absence of
gratuitous differences in data formats across software and
distributions is usually viewed as a Good Thing in itself; it is the
Unix way of doing things, the Free Software way, and the
insert-random-warm-and-fuzzy-buzzword-here way.

This argument, of course, assumes that the differences between the
(hypothetically enhanced) Debian syntax and the .desktop format *are*
gratuitous. I don't know whether or not they are, but this thread does
not seem to contain any replies to qestions of which technical
advantages the Debian format has that .desktop hasn't, which would
make a migration a Bad Thing, rather than just something that one
personally doesn't want to spend time on.


(Everyting resembling technical stuff above has been (mis)understood
from this thread. I actually don't know much about the menu system; it
doesn't seem to be available in a documented way to people who have
their own $HOME/.fvwm2rc)

-- 
Henning Makholm                 "The trouble is that the chapter is entirely
                      impenetrable. Its message is concealed behind not just
                    thickets of formalism, but hedges, woods, and forests of
          formalism. There are whole pages with not even a paragraph break."