Re: gnome, kde, xfce use non-policy main menu

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:

> I think that Russ is very pessimistic on the quality of the XDG desktop
> entry sepcification. It uses a simple syntax and 18 different keys, only
> 4 of them being required. Many of the Lintian errors noted earlier in
> this thread are related to the desktop menu specification, which is a
> separate document.

> http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/
> http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/

Russ formed his opinion by attempting to write code to the desktop entry
specification without additional reference to existing implementations and
watching it not work in the real world with real desktop entries.  That's
the acid test of a standard and the XDG desktop entry specification didn't
fare well.

The menu specification has other problems, but I am indeed also
complaining about the XDG desktop entry specification and specifically
saying that the desktop files in Debian do not universally comply with it,
that it is unclear and underspecified, and that it needs clarity and
additional work to be usable for a Debian policy.

I do think that if we had such a standard and additional checks and the
intention to enforce it, most of the problems with the desktop files in
/usr/share/applications could be relatively quickly cleaned up.  (The
*.desktop files outside of /usr/share/applications are a whole different
problem and are mostly a disaster from a compliance with the specification
perspective, but that may not be an issue; most of the ones outside of
that tree are legitimately used for internal purposes by different desktop
systems and aren't necessarily intended to comply with a spec.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>