Menu-Spec and nested AppDirs

[Heinrich Wendel]

On Thursday 26 May 2005 13:14, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> On Wednesday 25 May 2005 17:30, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> > Hey,
> > 	My take on this would be that editors shouldn't be editing .desktop
> > files by making a copy with the same file ID and putting them in
> > ~/.local/share/applications. $XDG_DATA_HOME, AFAICT, is for application
> > data, not user configuration files.
> >
> > 	To show a concrete problem with doing it this way, if you installed a
> > vim package in your home directory, you'd expect the package to install
> > vim.desktop in ~/.local/share/applications, overriding the user's
> > changes.
> >
> > 	So, I think editors should be creating their own directory for
> > edited .desktop files, say ~/.config/pyxdg-applications and copying
> > the .desktop files there, but with a different desktop file ID.
> >
> > 	That way you'd have, in ~/.config/menus/applications.menu:
> >
> > <Menu>
> >   <Name>Applications</Name>
> >   <AppDir>/home/foo/.config/pyxdg-applications</AppDir>
> >   <Menu>
> >     <Name>Debian</Name>
> >     <Include>
> >       <Filename>pyxdg-vim.desktop</Filename>
> >     </Include>
> >     <Exclude>
> >       <Filename>vim.desktop</Filename>
> >     </Exclude>
> >   </Menu>
> > </Menu>
>
> That's an interesting approach, I'm not totally convinced about it yet, but
> if we want to recommend that then we should standardize on a common prefix
> instead of "pyxdg-". It would be silly if every menu-editor started to add
> different prefixes... you would end up with things like
> pyxdg-kmenuedit-pyxdg-vim.desktop after a while.
>
> So to address that I propose a "xdg-changed-" prefix together with a
> $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/menus/applications-changed directory, referenced relative
> to the applications.menu file as <AppDir>applications-changed</AppDir>

Ok, i'm convinced that this seems to be the best solution currently, but still 
some points:

- Woudn't this make desktop-file-ids redunant? If not for menu editing why 
would you need them?
- What about new MenuEntries a User want's to add? Would they have the 
xdg-changed prefix as well?
- I don't think we need a dir and a prefix, one would be enough, i propose to 
not have a prefix, but a changed extension, like .cdesktop or something like 
that.

> Cheers,
> Waldo
mfg, heinrich