Re: Desktop menu categories

[Carlo Segre <segre@iit.edu>]

On Sun, 19 Aug 2007, Charles Plessy wrote:

> Le Sat, Aug 18, 2007 at 06:02:55PM -0700, Jordan Mantha a écrit :
> > I wrote the freedesktop.org xdg mailing list about this issue back in
> > June [1]. My proposal was to romote Science to a main category. There
> > was concern about how to deal with legacy  issues. What happens if
> > somebody installs a .desktop on an "older" distro (say etch or Fedora
> > Core 6)?
>
> Hi all,
>
> I think that I do not get the point : isn't the concept of a distro to
> install programs through packages? If somebody backports a recent
> program to FC6 or Debian Etch, then it is straightforward to patch the
> .desktop file to add `Application' back.
>
> Similarly, if there is a consensus in Debian that we should use
> `Science' instead of `Education' (by the way, I agree with this), we
> could start as soon as it is confirmed that it is technically possible
> to do this in GNOME, KDE and XFCE4 (I am not aware of other windows
> managers using the FreeDesktop menus). We just have to patch the
> .desktop files we distribute.

Of course we can, however since the unstable version of lintian checks for 
compliance with freedesktop.org, it will throw an error if we don't have 
the right combination of categories.  There are two solutions, file a bug 
against lintian, and ask that it not follow the freedesktop.org standard 
or change the standard and then bring lintian into compliance.

I think the latter is more sustainable.

Carlo


--
Carlo U. Segre -- Professor of Physics
Associate Dean for Special Projects, Graduate College
Illinois Institute of Technology
Voice: 312.567.3498            Fax: 312.567.3494
segre@iit.edu    http://www.iit.edu/~segre    segre@debian.org