[desktop entry spec] new FullName key

Frederic Peters fpeters at gnome.org
Tue Jul 21 08:20:43 PDT 2009


Hello all,

In preparation for GNOME Shell a question has been raised about the
way we display the name of the applications; the situation at the
moment in the GNOME Panel is simply to display the Name but it would
be nice to go further, using the GenericName, for example to have menu
items set as:
  <b>D-Feet</b>
  D-Bus Debugger

It would already be possible if Name and GenericName were used in a
consistent way, but as we put whatever we wanted to be displayed in
the menu in Name, we find ourselves with the Name embedding the
GenericName, such as:
  Name=Brasero Disc Burner
  GenericName=Disc Burner

A first proposal was to fix our desktop files (in our official suites
there are only three occurences of this problem) but the issue is 
broader (looking at other popular GTK+/GNOME applications, it appears
at least in Banshee, F-Spot, Gnumeric, Liferea, Rhythmbox, etc.) and
it is not certain all of them can be fixed.

Moreover with just Name and GenericName we could end up with having to
concatenate both keys, which would raise unknown translation issues.

Therefore comes this proposal to add a new FullName key, which would
typically be a combination of Name and GenericName, but could also be
a variant, for example:
  Name=Glade
  GenericName=User Interface Designer
  FullName=Glade Interface Designer

As this doesn't change the meaning of existing fields this change
doesn't have any impact on existing desktop files, and programs that
consume them.

How does it sound ?


Cheers,

        Frederic

--- desktop-entry-spec.xml.orig	2009-07-21 17:03:29.000000000 +0200
+++ desktop-entry-spec.xml	2009-07-21 17:03:39.000000000 +0200
@@ -401,6 +401,17 @@
             <entry>1-3</entry>
 	  </row>
 	  <row>
+	    <entry id="key-fullname"><varname>FullName</varname></entry>
+	    <entry>
+          Full name of the application, typically a combination of
+          <varname>Name</varname> and <varname>GenericName</varname>,
+          for example "Mozilla Web Browser".
+	    </entry>
+	    <entry>localestring</entry>
+	    <entry>NO</entry>
+            <entry>1-3</entry>
+	  </row>
+	  <row>
 	    <entry id="key-nodisplay"><varname>NoDisplay</varname></entry>
 	    <entry>
 		  <varname>NoDisplay</varname> means "this application exists, but don't display it in the menus".


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