Dozens of incomplete stuff in Desktop Entry Standard

Oswald Buddenhagen ossi at kde.org
Fri Jun 27 01:39:44 EEST 2003


On Thu, Jun 26, 2003 at 03:09:35PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > - "Some keys can have multiple values; these should be separated by a
> > semicolon. Those keys which have several values should have a semicolon as
> > the trailing character." -- sorry, it's not clear to me: if a key can have
> > multiple values but does only take one value in a particluar line of a
> > particular file, then does it have to be terminated by a semicolon?
> 
> The point here is about lists, examples are:
> 
>  Key=value1;value2;value3;
>  Key=value1;
> 
> empty list is presumably either ';' alone or just nothing.
> 
to my understanding, "" would be an empty list, while ";" is a list with
one empty element. this distiction actually looks like a good reason
for the trailing semicolon requirement.

> > Furthermore, the specification itself is buggy in section 8, Example
> > Desktop Entry, having a line "Actions=Edit;Inverse" where this trailing
> > semicolon is missing. Actually, what's the purpose of it, and what should
> > an implementation do if it isn't there? Wouldn't it be simpler to just
> > forget this trailing semicolon?
> 
> Current implementations tend to accept a missing semicolon, I don't
> remember any rationale for it.
>  
i think this makes no difference, as long as the last element is
non-emtpy and does not contain unquoted trailing whitespace.

> > - Terminal: false or true. As a legacy stuff 0 and 1 should be supported,
> > says the docs. I'd personally prefer 0 and 1 since these are world-wide
> > values, while true and false are English words. Why prefer English where
> > the same can be done with international symbols?
> 
kde is pretty tolerant here: true/yes/on and any non-zero integer is true; 
everthing else is false.

greetings

-- 
Hi! I'm a .signature virus! Copy me into your ~/.signature, please!
--
Chaos, panic, and disorder - my work here is done.



More information about the xdg mailing list