Re: Debian packages and freedesktop.org (Gnome, KDE, etc) menu entries
On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 04:12:58AM +0100, Moritz Moeller-Herrmann wrote:
| Cameron Patrick wrote:
|
| > On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 01:57:29PM +0000, Henning Makholm wrote:
| >
| > | > Because you gain *nothing*
| > |
| > | Are you claiming that everyone who says that .desktop has technical
| > | advantages is a liar? These features actually do not exist in the
| > | desktop format? (It may be so; I have no firsthand information, but it
| > | does sound far out).
| >
| > Most of the advantages of .desktop that I am aware of are currently
| > vapourware - i.e. they're in the specs on the freedesktop.org site, but
| > not yet implemented in KDE and Gnome.
|
| This is not true. Almost all features are being used in current KDE and to
| some degree by current GNOME. Could you please give examples?
The Categories= field (to place .desktop files into menu hierarchies) is
AFAIK not used at all by KDE, although I think Gnome may support it.
The freedesktop 'menu' standard (where sub-menus can be generated from
the categories in the .desktop files, and which also claims to allow
"legacy" menus to be merged with the new standard) doesn't seem to have
been adopted yet by anyone. The worst part, though, is that currently
both KDE and Gnome store their .desktop files in different places, so
that a .desktop that is available to KDE (and placed in /usr/lib/applnk)
won't automatically appear in the Gnome menu, which looks in
/usr/lib/applications. I presume that these things are being worked on
in later releases of KDE and Gnome, but I don't know where to look for
the current status of their adoption of the freedesktop.org standards.
I have also noticed what might be considered as 'abuse' of these
standards, presumably due to poor implementation of some fields. For
example, /usr/share/applications/epiphany.desktop lists its Name as "Web
Browser"; it should more correctly list its name as "Epiphany" and have
a GenericName field containing "Web Browser".
Cameron.
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