Proposed extension to Desktop Entry Standard

[David Faure]

On Monday 18 October 2004 21:56, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> On Monday 18 October 2004 19:31, David Faure wrote:
> > When the Exec lines doesn't contain any special arguments like %f %F %u or
> > %U, %f is assumed. This is fine in most cases, but not when launching an
> > application from a .desktop file's Action. In that case the path to the
> > .desktop file will passed to the application, but it might not want any
> > argument (i.e. it doesn't care which .desktop file it's being called from).
> 
> I don't think the Action part is part of the actual spec, is it? 

It sort of is, although not fully specified.
http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/desktop-entry-spec/desktop-entry-spec-0.9.4.html
Looking for Action shows
1) the Actions key in the table
2) an example in appendix A.
[Desktop Action Inverse]
Exec=fooview --inverse %f
Name=Foo Viewer (inverse image)

The example is broken though, the Actions key itself is missing.

Does anyone else than KDE support the Actions field?

> That would not be compatible with previous versions of the spec. Why not just 
> disable the implicit adding of %f for Actions?

That would not be compatible with previous versions of KDE :(

Maybe we should use Exec[$b]=... instead - where b is any character that
doesn't have a special meaning yet, and which would mean "no % expansion
at all here"? Since the other [$x] things are not part of the spec, this would
be a KDE-specific fix then, not a spec change (and this is fine since trash.desktop
is most certainly kde-specific).

> The spec doesn't say that %f should be assumed in the first place.

That's a bug in the spec IMHO - we always assumed %f to be default, for the
normal case of an Exec line (not talking about special actions here).
Otherwise, what would happen when associating a file with an application,
and the application's Exec line says e.g. Exec=gimp ? This is soooo common,
the spec should really say "%f" is assumed; otherwise many existing .desktop
files will suddenly be broken.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).