[Portland] Summarize current plan?

[Lubos Lunak]

On Monday 13 March 2006 15:29, Jeremy White wrote:
> >  You can and you or anybody else are free to work on that, it's just that
> > this is not the point of DAPI. Installing a menu entry is fairly simple,
> > you just read the spec and basically just put a .desktop file somewhere
> > as the spec says. It's supposed to work with any desktop and you in fact
> > don't even need a desktop running at the install time.
>
> Go read the thread I posted.  It's not as easy as you think; the
> spec is imprecise when you're doing root installs.
[...]
 Short summary: The menu spec doesn't work on Mandriva, Kubuntu has a bug, 
some desktops doesn't support the spec and the spec is imprecise in some 
details, so in practice it doesn't work in 100% cases.

 Now, what exactly would you like to happen here? That Mandriva screws up the 
spec is their fault, nothing here can change that and it can happen with 
anything that somebody intentionally breaks it or ignores it. Kubuntu has a 
bug, well, bugs happen and will keep happening, again nothing you can do 
about that here. Some desktops don't support the spec at all (and you admit 
most of your problems come from that), so, what exactly do you expect to 
happen on this list that changes their mind?

 You have a spec for this and the spec is supposed to work, so it's a solved 
problem. No amount of bitching is going to solve the things listed above, at 
least as long as you complain to those who're not guilty.

 As for the last item, the spec needing some clarifications/fixes/whatever, if 
you really could have spent man months on it, why didn't you instead try to 
spend noticeably less time on fixing the spec and doing what'd be necessary? 
It's not like you're not allowed to.

> Let's take an example; opening a URL.
>
> *You* might think it's easy to open a URL because you always
> run in KDE and you set your preferences up properly.  But there is
> not a clear equivalent of the menu-spec for this.

 Good news for you, OpenUrl is the first call in dapi/doc/API.txt . And your 
last sentence describes the motivation - there's no spec and it depends on 
the running desktop, so there can be no simple shared implementation. You'll 
just call OpenUrl and the active backend daemon will take care of it.

> The menu-spec is lovely.  I can say "We support the XDG menu spec.  If
> you do not have an XDG compliant WM, talk to your vendor - it's *their*
> problem, not mine."
>
> I have no such luck with browsers.  If a user says to me that their
> .mailcap file clearly specifies that we should use lynx, what
> moral authority do I have to say that the user is wrong?  .mailcap
> is a completely legitimate standard...  and now I'm spending man months
> just trying to open a @#$@#$ url.

 In KDE the KDE's daemon will be used for opening an URL the KDE way, the same 
in GNOME or wherever else. If there will be a desktop (or "desktop") that 
will have .mailcap as the way of opening URLs, it will be their problem, not 
yours, to write another daemon that implements this functionality. Nothing 
else will need to be touched, no another "if" in a script or anything like 
that.

> Finally, to give you some perspective of how this feels to me:
> in December, I took away that someone was going to document the
> standards in trivial things like opening URLs, and then we were
> going to write some simple scripts.  Like, for example,
>   xdg-open-url [--new-window] url
>
> Wow!  How nice would that be!  One line of code!  My web browser
> integration needs are done in 15 minutes!

 Nobody's stopping you. Or anybody else. Maybe it's rather you who doesn't get 
it? Things will happen only after somebody makes them happen. Just because 
I've chosen one way to solve the problem and started working on that doesn't 
mean it's the Only True Way(TM).

> Instead, everyone seems to be off solving some other 'hard' problem,
> leaving me with weeks and weeks of hair wrangling to figure out the
> 'best' way to open a @$@#$@#$ URL.

 Hmm, you've studied the archives of this list, haven't you? Maybe you should 
read again the first mail in February that restarted the discussion after 
month's silence. If I were interested in solving 'hard' problems I would have 
joined those discussions instead of sending that mail. Yes, I could have done 
some scripts first, but given their simplicity I kind of thought there would 
be enough people to create those, and moreover I'd like to create something 
that should be powerful and extensible enough even when people decide to move 
further down on http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/PortlandIntegrationTasks .

> Urk.  I've ranted on quite a bit, haven't I?
>
> Sorry about that; the years spent fighting vfolders and
> other menu inanities have left deep and bitter scars.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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