Desktop Entry Standard: Path key

[David Faure]

On Tuesday 01 July 2008, David Faure wrote:
> On Monday 30 June 2008, Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
> > Haha, I'd call that "good design," not a hack: isn't the best way to
> > extend a format to find a way to do so while remaining compatible with
> > it?
> 
> Yes, exactly. And this syntax allows for more modifiers to be added in the
>  future. KDE support [$i] for "immutable" (i.e. cannot be overridden by a
>  local file), and [$d] for "deleted" (when a local file wants to mark a key
>  from a global file as being deleted, not just set to empty) Those can be
>  combined like [$ei], [$di] etc.
> [$e] also supports shell commands, like Host[$e]=$(hostname)
> 
> I'm not asking for all those features to be in the spec (although I
>  wouldn't mind that either :), I'm just showing why this solution is nice:
>  it's extendable for other things in the future, by providing a location
>  where to put key-specific (or group-specific, using [group][$i]) flags.
> 
> The issue of backwards compatibility remains, though, current non-kde
>  implementations cannot handle Path[$e]=$HOME/Documents. However KDE 3
>  already generated such files, so the simplest course of action would be to
>  just add support for it in the spec, and see interoperability increase
>  over time, while other implementations start supporting this.

Ping?
Is this something we can hope to see in the desktop entry standard and in 
other implementations of it?

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, http://www.davidfaure.fr
Sponsored by Nokia to work on KDE, incl. Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org).