Bug#460504: dh_desktop/dh_icons madness

[Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>]

Package: general
Severity: normal

For a while now some folks have been going around asking various package
maintainers to inject dh_icons and/or dh_desktop calls into the package build
rules.  The basic argument appears to be that your package needs to do this so
that my desktop environment will work correctly.  I don't think this approach
has correct and sustainable principles.  And what is more, if some random third
packages or user environments dictate what other, unrelated packages have to do
to function with them, we will in practice never reach a state where everything
works.  Furthermore, if other desktop environments come up with their own
variants of icon caching of MIME file registration (since these are supposedly
Free Desktop standards) or perhaps completely new file registration
requirements, we will have an unmaintainable mess of competing implementations
of registration scripts, and thousands of packages stuck in a transition
somewhere between all of them.

It seems to me that, in principle, if some third package or user environment
wants something to be done for its own functional benefit, it should be its own
responsibility to arrange that, instead of bothering thousands of other
packages with it.  This appears to be the only robust and maintainable
approach.  On a technical level, the best approach would appear to be
implementing some sort of global dpkg postinst and postrm hooks.  Perhaps there
are other ideas, but the current approach needs to stop; it won't work.