Request for clarification on menu/file spec

[Waldo Bastian]

On Wednesday 08 February 2006 10:56, Jeremy White wrote:
> > If there is concensus that that is the right long term direction and that
> > the benefits outweigh the disadvantages then I guess we should go that
> > way. I would like to hear some more cheers of support for that direction
> > first though.
>
> You can consider this another -1 vote.
>
> IMHO, the current menu-spec is nearly perfect.  It is simple,
> comprehensible, and requires no 3rd party tools in order to
> implement it.  It just needs a minor clarification and
> we'll be good to go.
>
> Yes, isolation of all files into their own directory is an
> admirable goal, but I don't see that happening.  Further, if
> we isolate into /usr/local/share/applications, the pollution
> is kept to a minimum, and the simplicity of how menus work
> is maximized.
>
> Finally, I did some further research, and my earlier comments
> were not quite accurate.  I looked at SuSE 10, Fedora Core 4,
> and Ubuntu 5.10.
>
> Broadly, I found that /usr/local/share/applications did not
> exist on stock installs of any of these distributions.
> Only SuSE 10 had an explicit XDG_DATA_DIRS; the rest had
> none defined; I used the presumed default of /usr/local/share and
> /usr/share.
>
> On SuSE (Gnome and KDE) and Fedora Core Gnome, if I created
> a /usr/local/share/applications directory and put my .desktop
> file into it, it worked just as I expected, and there was
> much rejoicing.
>
> On Fedora Core 4 KDE and Ubuntu 5.10 (Gnome only), creating
> /usr/local/share/applications and putting a .desktop file
> there had no effect at all.  No joy in Mudville whatsoever.
> Moving the .desktop file to /usr/share/applications worked fine.
>
> My earlier tests were on Debian/etch and had much the same
> result as that of Ubuntu (that was on my laptop, which is at home, so I
> can't easily reproduce it atm).
>
> Hence, I am willing to be persuaded that the first directory
> in XDG_DATA_DIRS is the appropriate spec, although I retain
> a fondness for the first existing and writable directory, just
> because that's how I'm going to implement my code anyways :-/.

What about "the first existing and writable directory out 
of /usr/local/share/applications and /usr/share/applications" ?

Cheers,
Waldo
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/attachments/20060208/ec35ef43/attachment.pgp