A new addition to desktop-file-utils? (Repost)

[Jeff Abbott]

On Oct 6, 2006, at 3:26 PM, Bastian, Waldo wrote:

> [This _is_ the main freedesktop list :-]

Ah, my mistake then -- I thought freedesktop at lists.freedesktop.org  
was, so I appreciate the correction. :-)

> Xdg-open (part of xdg-utils, 1.0 version to be released Real Soon Now
> (tm)) already provides a way to launch .desktop files in a desktop
> neutral way, reusing the existing infrastructure for handling such
> files.

Thanks for pointing me to this.

> I'm interested to learn more about your tool though, it might be  
> useful
> to include it in xdg-open as a fallback mechanism for people that  
> don't
> have Gnome or KDE installed.

Looking at it in CVS, I like the idea of it a lot and I think it  
largely accomplishes the same things as I was trying to do, save  
one.  It would require changes to the Desktop Entry Spec, but my tool  
-- and the reason I implemented it in C, which is far from my  
favorite language -- would allow it to be called as a shebang line in  
all .desktop files.  With that and executable .desktop files, one  
could open the app from a shell just by running the .desktop file  
itself.  I don't have any use cases to point to where this behavior  
might be completely desirable, unfortunately, because my interest in  
creating this tool stemmed from:

1) Seeing Tom's blog entry and thinking, "Hey, that sounds like fun."
2) Being cooped up at home with a cold and nothing else to do.  :-(

I'd love to share the code I wrote for feedback and derision --  
should I upload it to a site of my own and provide a URL, send a  
patch to the list, or is there a better way?

Thanks,
Jeff