activation thought

[Michael Meeks]

On Wed, 2003-10-15 at 06:50, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Summary of KDE activation from the docs, people with a clue please
> correct me: a query language for locating .desktop files. But desktop
> files can point to shared libraries or DCOP services, not only
> executables.

	Interesting.

> Perhaps the global cache and query processor is a D-BUS service and/or
> built in to dbus-daemon; or perhaps it's just a shared library. But even
> if activation involves D-BUS, it may not really be _for_ D-BUS only.
> Maybe we should be generalizing the .desktop entry spec beyond menus?

	Given the worst-case timings for bonobo-activation .server / VFS
parsing - please, please, please can we not design yet another system
that is "tens of scattered files with 156 translations" based.[1].

	I'm assuming we can whack multiple services into the same description -
is that so ?

	I'd also be slightly concerned about adding too many more translatable
strings to a .desktop file; the (largest) example of 2 fully translated
keys: Comment,Name is ~4k; parsing this is not scalable - cf. the
gnome-vfs stuff.

	Also; I guess it'd be worth using a .dbus-extn instead of .desktop
extension (?).

	Regards,

		Michael.

[1] - ie. the backwards-compatible design of "hey - lets scrape every
scattered .desktop file we can possibly find off the oxide and parse
them all" is not really attractive.
-- 
 michael@ximian.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot