Current desktop detection / app access - take 2.

[Michael Meeks]

Wow,

	And it is (apparently) me that doesn't listen ?

On Thu, 2004-05-27 at 14:50 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> For tooltips, button order, etc. I think we should address that in a way
> specific to the problem at hand. DESKTOP_UI_GUIDELINES=gnome|kde for
> example, is much less bad than DESKTOP=gnome which is a hack of
> unbounded damage. Though choosing one set of guidelines to me is the
> only sane thing to do, I agree it is not politically feasible (yet).

	Um; so - if one read the initial proposal; it was in fact not
DESKTOP=gnome - which is transparently foolish; but

	DESKTOP=rox:gnome-vfs:gtk

One could clearly extend that to:

	DESKTOP=rox:gnome-vfs:gnome-button-order:gtk

	in a way that (as far as I can see) is ~indistinguishable from
'DESKTOP_UI_GUIDELINES=gnome|kde'.

> But DESKTOP=foo is an O(n) rather than O(1) approach in terms of
> effort, and so I don't see how it's better even by the "less work and
> faster" metric if we really, genuinely intend to solve the multi-desktop
> issues.

	This is why no-one is proposing DESKTOP=foo as a solution; but
DESKTOP=capability1:capability2:capability3 - thus splitting the problem
into a number of O(~2) approaches.

> Moreover, DESKTOP=foo plainly excludes any desktop environments other
> than GNOME and KDE because nobody will bother with the others, the
> others will have to emulate one of GNOME/KDE.

	I had expected actual engagement with the issue here. The first cut of
the draft spec. _clearly_ mentions a plurality of desktop environments -
which was fundamental to the (limited) amount of thought I put into it.
cf. http://primates.ximian.com/~michael/desktop.txt.

	The whole thing may be a bad idea; but - lets talk about the idea
itself not some half-cocked mis-hashed version of it - otherwise we
won't engage at all and will get no-where.

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael at ximian.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot