Application id, XDG App, and you.

[Jasper St. Pierre]

Well, having "Aliases" means that to look up "gnome-clocks.desktop",
we would have to parse through and read every desktop file at startup,
for anything that wanted to match, since we still don't have a
.desktop file cache. But it would help in the reverse case -- when the
file gets renamed, also check out the aliases. But we also have the
reverse merging problem (what if there's multiple aliases and each one
has a different policy? Yikes)

At some point I should probably make a proposal to xdg-list. I think
we should probably also have a .desktop file cache as a general
component so we can make proposals like this without having to worry
about implementation cost. I know desrt was working on this at some
point, but I don't know how far she got with it.

On Thu, Feb 4, 2016 at 9:02 AM, Simon McVittie
<simon.mcvittie at collabora.co.uk> wrote:
> On 04/02/16 05:23, Jasper St. Pierre wrote:
>> One thing I've wanted in the past is a very simple file to allow
>> someone to declare an alias for an application. So GNOME Clocks would
>> ship both an org.gnome.clocks.desktop and a gnome-clocks.desktop, the
>> latter looking something like:
>>
>>     [Desktop Entry]
>>     AliasFor=org.gnome.clocks.desktop
>
> Or maybe org.gnome.clocks.desktop could grow a key
>
>     Aliases=gnome-clocks.desktop;
>
> or something?
>
> This seems like something to take to the xdg (not -app) mailing list and
> the main Desktop Entry Specification document.
>
> --
> Simon McVittie
> Collabora Ltd. <http://www.collabora.com/>



-- 
  Jasper