Desktop Specification 0.9.4

[Koblinger Egmont]

> Please take a look at my version of the desktop specification, it collects the
> comments discussed in this list:
> http://www.cojobo.net/~h_wendel/stuff/desktop-entry-spec.html
>
> if there are no complains, i'll put it on the website on saturday.

Hi,

Some minor comments:

- <offtopic> Currently html version of 0.9.3 on www.freedesktop.org gives
a 403 forbidden :(  So does the html version of Desktop Menu
Specification </offtopic>

- The release date doesn't appear in the html version, even though the xml
version contains it. It would be nice to see it in the html one, too.

- I'd like to revert chapter numbering, that is, repacing <sect1> with
<sect0> or <chapter> or I-don't-know-what in the xml file, if it is
possible with the DTD. Currently appendices seem to be one level higher
than sections, and so their title are typeset with bigger fonts in html.

- Appendix C says .kdelnk and [KDE Desktop Entry] are deprecated. All
references of .kdelnk were removed from the main part of the document,
however, [KDE Desktop Entry] is still present there. I'd personally remove
[KDE Desktop Entry] from the "Basic format of the file" chapter and only
mention it under appendix C.

- Legacy-Mixed: "pt" is mentioned twice for ISO-8859-1, "wa" isn't put in
alphabetical order, same for "ga cy".

- When I proposed about 2 weeks ago that having a Terminal=true without an
Exec should launch the terminal, Havoc suggested to rather have two
desktop files with OnlyShowIn fields. Let's suppose I want to use konsole
for KDE and xterm for everything else. I create a .desktop file for
konsole with OnlyShowIn=KDE; and one for xterm with
OnlyShowIn=GNOME;ROX;XFCE; but in this case I have to update this field
every time a new freedesktop-friendly windowing system appears. So I'd
rather see it possible to tell "everything except KDE" instead of
enumearting all of them. An obvious solution would be to introduce
the DontShowIn key. Other solutions might be OnlyShowIn=!KDE but this one
seems to be a little bit braindamaged to me. Any ideas?

- The definition of OnlyShowIn came from Desktop Menu Spec I think. It
would be nice to include the possible values here, or at least give a
pointer to them.

- What's the difference between NoDisplay and Hidden?

- My biggest headache, the exact interpretation of Exec's value is still
open, I think it should be addressed for 0.9.5 or 0.9.6. Now I understand
that the system() call (or something similar, e.g. sh -c) is used but
taking care to properly escape filenames. However as it highly depends on
in which contect the given exec parameter appears, a trivial variant of
the shell's parsing has to be duplicated. I see it important to specify
this minimal syntax, for two reasons: 1) for the .desktop file's creator
to know what he is allowed to do and how his exec line will work, 2) for a
desktop system's programmer to know what to do for these .desktop files to
work correctly. I'll try to study current Gnome and KDE implementation and
propose a possible specification if I'll have time to, but as any of us, I
also have plenty of other things to do, so I cannot promise anything... :(



cheers,

Egmont