Menu-spec update (Was: [Patch] Update 'How to' to clarify computation of datadir)

[Rodney Dawes]

On Wed, 2006-03-22 at 19:50 +0100, Francois Gouget wrote:
> This email was misleading. For one given product we normally produce 
> three types of installers:
>   * a graphical, interactive GUI installer which lets the user choose 
> where he wants to install the application, and does not require being 
> root. This is the installer that was mentioned in the email.
>   * an RPM package that can be installed on any rpm-based system. This 
> installer must be non-interactive.
>   * a Debian package that can be installed on any dpkg-based system. 
> This installer must be non-interactive too.
> 
> It is for these last two installers that requiring interaction with a 
> user is a problem.

For packages such as RPM and DPKG, you should be installing in a
specific location, compliant with the packaging policies of the
distribution you are targetting the packages for. There should be no
question of where files get installed in these cases. The distributions
specify this stuff for you, and therefore those seem outside the scope
of what we're trying to cover here. Packages for distributions should
be well integrated with the distribution they are for.

Also note that if you install a .desktop file for a menu-item for your
application, and it specifies MimeType handling information, you're
going to need to run update-desktop-database for the directory to which
the desktop file was installed, after installation, as well. It seems
like what we really need is something like an xdg-prefixes.d/ where
vendors can install files to which specify configuration information for
finding various things in that prefix, such as what is currently
specified in the XDG_*_DIRS variables. Doing it through config files,
means we could avoid the need for altering the environment, which then
requires restart of applications, for changes to take effect. We could
just reparse the files, and go on about life, instead.

And these files could always be installed to a known prefix/location,
such as /etc/xdg/prefixes.d/ or something, to avoid the obviously silly
requirement of configuring which prefix to look for them in, by using
XDG_CONFIG_DIRS for them.

-- dobey