update-desktop-database location

[Matthias Clasen]

On Tue, 2006-02-07 at 15:34 +0100, Christian Westgaard wrote:
> On Mon, 06 Feb 2006 16:14:03 +0100, Matthias Clasen <mclasen at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 2006-02-06 at 15:46 +0100, Christian Westgaard wrote:
> >> http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/desktop-entry-spec-latest.html
> >>
> >> Does not specify the location of the update-desktop-database script.
> >>
> >> I currently test for XDG support like this:
> >>
> >> if update-desktop-database --help >/dev/null 2>&1; then
> >>
> >> But when update-desktop-database is not in $PATH, I'm out of luck.
> >>
> >> Is there a better test? A specced one?
> >>
> >
> > Well, common sense suggests to look in /usr/bin. Does that really needs
> > to be explicit in the spec ? Come on.
> 
> Actually on SuSE update-desktop-database is not
> located in /usr/bin nor in $PATH.
> 
> One might like to say that this means SuSE does
> not follow the standard, but one cannot since:
> The standard does not state explicitly that update-desktop-database must be in $PATH
> (nor that it must be in a specific location, like /usr/bin or $XDG_BIN_DIRS )
> 

I personally think its silly to put a binary thats supposed to be used
by third-party apps out of $PATH. Maybe that should be made explicit in
the spec then. I don't think inventing yet another env var for this will
make things any better.

Matthias