problem with "numeric" type in Desktop Entry Spec

Dan Winship danw at gnome.org
Tue Apr 17 09:45:00 PDT 2007


The description of the "numeric" data type in the Desktop Entry Spec is:

    a valid floating point number as recognized by the %f specifier for
    scanf.

But this makes its representation locale-dependent (eg, "Version=1.0" in
en_EN, "Version=1,0" in fr_FR). It needs to say:

    a valid floating point number as recognized by the %f specifier for
    scanf in the C locale.

(Google codesearch doesn't turn up any desktop files that actually mess
up because of this.)

The description of the Version key also sort of implies that a
conforming .desktop file will have either no Version key or
"Version=1.0", but really, it could also have "Version=1",
"Version=1.00000", or "Version=+01.0e0".

(Google doesn't turn up any .desktop files that get that wrong either,
but if a GNOME app used g_key_file_set_double() to set the Version key
in a new .desktop file, it would end up with "Version=1".)

-- Dan



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