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Bug 4884

Summary: Gentoo needs a concensus on how to deal with .desktop files
Product: Gentoo Linux Reporter: Markus Bertheau (RETIRED) <ska-fan>
Component: Current packagesAssignee: Gentoo KDE team <kde>
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE    
Severity: normal CC: azarah, bart, gnome, spider, vaino.jarvela
Priority: High    
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: x86   
OS: Linux   
URL: http://www.freedesktop.org
Whiteboard:
Package list:
Runtime testing required: ---

Description Markus Bertheau (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2002-07-11 16:56:26 UTC
.desktop files are the files that make up you desktop icons and Kicker/GNOME
panel menu contents.

It'd be great if the major GUI apps came up with a menu entry by default.
Applications like alevt don't include one in their distribution.

However, there are different approaches about when to install .desktop files
that can be taken:

1. Install a .desktop file with GUI applications, regardless of whether you have
KDE or GNOME installed.

2. Install a .desktop file only if you have GNOME or KDE installed.

And there needs to ba a consensus on where to install them. As far as I know,
both KDE and GNOME follow the .desktop specification (www.freedesktop.org), 
which also includes a standard location for .desktop files,
/usr/share/applications/ .
Comment 1 Seemant Kulleen (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2002-07-11 18:40:47 UTC
I thought I'd get all the Gnome2/KDE3 people on this one :)
Comment 2 Dan Armak (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2002-09-07 06:15:52 UTC
Hmm... Interesting thing to do one day. Right now kde vs. gnome and kde vs. 
redhat etc. seem to be fighting over who implements what standard and what 
distribution uses what default, so we may want to see if there's anyone we like 
enough to emulate, and any standards we care to follow. 
Comment 3 Hannes Mehnert (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2002-11-04 08:26:41 UTC
note: there is a program kappfinder, from kdebase, which finds programs and  
add them to the menu, maybe we can take a look how it do this.  
Comment 4 Dan Armak (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2002-11-23 14:38:14 UTC
I think it just matches binaries with known names from your PATH to .desktop files it 
comes with... 
Comment 5 Väinö Järvelä 2003-02-12 06:59:56 UTC
It would be nice if there was do* command for creating .desktop files for programs that don't have one in the package. I can't think any "nice" system for this at the moment. Maybe just put one in FILESDIR and do* just copies it to the right place. But the way should be standardized in Portage so there won't be a+1 scripts doing the same thing inside ebuilds and a+1 headache fixing/changing them.
Comment 6 Paul de Vrieze (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-06-08 08:13:27 UTC
I believe it would be time that a generalized gentoo menu system got implemented. Some people have stated that they were looking into this, lets see how it goes.
Comment 7 Heinrich Wendel (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-08-04 11:52:58 UTC

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 18638 ***