.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/ .
I thought I'd get all the Gnome2/KDE3 people on this one :)
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.
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.
I think it just matches binaries with known names from your PATH to .desktop files it comes with...
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.
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.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 18638 ***
