Bug#484656: Fw: gnome, kde, xfce use non-policy main menu

Begin forwarded message:

Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:14:07 -0700
From: Russ Allbery <rra.DeleteThis@debian.org>
To: debian-devel.DeleteThis@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: gnome, kde, xfce use non-policy main menu


Charles Plessy <plessy.DeleteThis@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/>


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