XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP (was: Adding Unity to OnlyShowIn allowed values)

[PCMan]

Thank you for mentioning this important issue again.
I think the environment variable can be used in desktop entry spec for
OnlyShowIn/NotShowIn and for determine default applications.
In addition, the proposed desktop actions spec for file managers also
needs a reliable way to determine current DE.
Since desktop entry spec is used extensively nowadays, even in other
specs such as menu and autostart specs, it's important to have a
common, easy, and reliable way to check current DE.
We already implemented support for this environment variable in our LXDE.
When XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=GNOME, we can show applications with
OnlyShowIn=GNOME rather than our apps in the application menu.
Please consider adding this to desktop entry spec.

On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Kevin Krammer <kevin.krammer at gmx.at> wrote:
> On Saturday, 2011-03-05, Ted Gould wrote:
>> On Fri, 2011-03-04 at 18:37 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
>> > On Wed, 2011-03-02 at 10:25 -0600, Ted Gould wrote:
>> > > I haven't seen any objection, just questions to this.  Final call?
>> >
>> > I have voiced my objection to the general idea of 'desktop switch'
>> > behaviour changes, but that's more of a complaint against
>> > XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP than against OnlyShowIn=Unity
>>
>> I'm unsure why you object.  It seem to be something that's generally
>> useful for applications to know.  For instance if they wanted to have a
>> configuration check box for "Show on Plasma Desktop" or "Show in
>> Messaging Tray" or something like that.  They could make the strings
>> more informative if the information was available.
>
> I think Matthias' point is that in order to do exactly that you'll need to
> look for the respective target functionality rather than assuming a one-to-one
> mapping of some identifier to a specific configuration.
>
> Basically all Free Software desktop workspaces consist of a setup of multiple
> processes, sometimes one process per task (IIRC that's how XFCE does it),
> sometimes two or more tasks combined into one process (e.g. GNOME Shell,
> Plasma desktop).
>
> One could argue to not care about non-default setups, e.g. using xfce-panel
> with a Nautlius desktop in a KDE session, but what about official deviations,
> e.g. GNOME 3 fallback on systems without 3D acceleration?
>
> Cheers,
> Kevin
>
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