[Portland] Screen saver questions / proposal

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Tuesday 24 April 2007, Jeremy White wrote:
> Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > On Tuesday 24 April 2007, Jeremy White wrote:
> >> So first question:  wouldn't it make more sense to just allow
> >> those .desktop files to be anywhere in the menu hierarchy?
> >
> > since we didn't actually want the screensavers in the user's applications
> > menu and since they are more like "plugins" to the screensaver control,
> > kde has moved the .desktop files to services/ where they can be queried
> > for. it's the same .desktop files, just outside of the applications menu
> > area. hopefully this doesn't put too many monkey wrenches into things,
> > but it does make more sense this way imho.
>
> Um, but isn't that the whole purpose of the NoDisplay key in the .desktop
> file?

not really, unless the application menu is intended to become a dumping ground 
for every application's plugins, add-ons, protocols, etc. these are 
application specific details and therefore shouldn't need to be waded through 
by sys admins or dealt with in .menu files; shoving everything possible into 
share/applications/ is perhaps "easy" but it's also pretty disrespectful of 
a) the intended problem being solved and b) the people for whome the solution 
was designed for.

> And, again, you've replicated the entire problem sequence we had with
> the .menu desktop files - the algorithm to figure out where to put them
> is annoying and desktop specific.

actually it's pretty simple, much simpler than the app menu issue since we 
don't have the need for multiple presentation options of the same body of 
data; they are all screensavers, the most we care about is "show opengl 
savers, or not" (for instance). and since screensaver .desktop aren't cross 
desktop right now anyways this becomes even less of an issue.

> I suppose you could modify xdg-desktop-menu to take a --screensaver
> option which would 'know' to manipulate things in an alternate
> directory, but that seems wrong to me.

remind me why you want to show your screensavers in the application menu? 

to me it makes much more sense to define the type of service 
(e.g. "ScreenSaver"), categories and additional (potentially app specific) 
details in a .desktop file and put all of those in a separate share/services/ 
directory which serves as a sort of registry for these kinds of things.

it keeps apps and services/plugins/protocol definitions separate (aka "user 
relevant info" vs "implementation details") and allows for rather more 
interesting discovery/querying for these kinds of things.

we can, of course, hack things into share/applications. it's just not 
particularly elegant or scalable.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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