Application id, XDG App, and you.

[Ray Strode]

Hi,

> 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
>
Here's the hack we did for gedit for instance:

# for backward compatibility with user defined file associations•
cat << EOF > $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_datadir}/applications/gedit.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Name=gedit
Exec=gedit %U
Type=Application
MimeType=text/plain;
NoDisplay=true
X-GNOME-UsesNotifications=false
X-RHEL-AliasOf=org.gnome.gedit
EOF

Then we did a little gtk+ patch to filter X-RHEL-AliasOf entries from
the app chooser, and we still relied on the map in gnome-shell for
doing deduplication of apps in gnome-shell.