[Portland] Re: OSDL DTL Tech board on freedesktop.org specs - Thu, Aug 10

[Joseph Kowalski]

> From: Vincent Untz <vuntz at gnome.org>
...
> Would it be possible to send minutes to the list for people who won't be
> able to attend the conference call?

I hope this is an appropriate use of these aliases.  I was unable to call-in
to the meeting.  Actually, unwilling is a better term because it would be
4:00 am where I live.

I have one additional AI for transforming the existing xdg specifications
to "1.0 status".  Please make sure that any specification is listed as such
and not hidden in "Implementation Notes".  Implementation notes are not to
be programmed to or depended upon, right?

The one case I know of is in the Icon Theme Specification:

    Implementation Notes

    The algorithm as described in this document works by always  looking
    up filenames in  directories  (a stat in unix  terminology).  A good
    implementation  is expected to read the directories once, and do all
    lookups in memory using that information.

    This caching can make it impossible for users to add icons without
    having to restart applications.  In order to handle this, any
    implementation that does caching is required to look at the mtime of
    the toplevel icon directories when doing a cache lookup, unless it
    already did so less than 5 seconds ago.  This means that any icon
    editor or theme installation program need only to change the mtime
    of the the toplevel directory where it changed the theme to make
    sure that the new icons will eventually get used.

Bugs have been filed and closed based on these implementation notes.  Either
this is specification (and hence the bugs were properly closed) or its
implementation (and hence they shouldn't have been).  I tend to think in this
particular case, this is specification, but I leave that up to the owners.

Just please remove this and any similar ambiguities.

- thanks,

- Joseph Kowalski