PATCH: Menu Spec - Categories

[Jeremy White]

> this-is-what-works-today status, like the Menu Spec 1.0. Looking at
> Picasa I suspect that the Google people have some additional items that
> they would like to see addressed wrt screensavers.

I can speak to that; my apology for missing this thread when it went
by the first time.

The main desires are a way to indicate that Picasa can serve
as a screen saver, to set Picasa as the default screen saver,
and to bring up the screen saver configuration utility.  A goal
is that this can all be accomplished in user mode, as Picasa
is set as a screen saver by user action, not at install time.

I recently brought this up on the Portland list in the context of
xdg-utils changes to support this.

First, I think I have largely deduced the new scheme for doing
screen savers in both Gnome and KDE; that a .desktop file
with Actions keys and a category of Screensaver specifies
a screensaver to the system.  I applaud; that's an improvement
over the fairly awkward xscreensaver adaptations that I found in
the wild a year ago.

The only trick, then, is where to put this .desktop file to
indicate to the WM that we're alive.

My preference is to modify my existing picasa.desktop file to
make it a Screensaver as well as an Application, and then just
install it the same way I do now, and have the WM just figure
it out for me.

The current reality on KDE 3.5.6 is that I have to duplicate
my .desktop file, and put a copy under share/applnk/System/Screensavers.
I don't feel as confident in my Gnome research; it seems that
there is a comparable directory there, but only for root installs -
there is no way to install a screen saver to a user only directory that
I could find.

Aaron reports on the Portland list that the current design for
KDE4 is for screen savers to go under share/services.

No one from Gnome has chimed in with the planned future design
for this within Gnome.  The XFCE guys, I'm sure, are secretly fuming
that I haven't considered them <grin>.

That implies that Picasa would need to quadruple the .desktop file, install
the original with xdg-desktop-menu, and then hunt down and put
one in the Gnome place, one in System/Screensavers, and one in services/.
We'd undoubtedly write an xdg-utils script to do all of that.  I'd like to avoid
writing that script, because I'm lazy :-/.

So I'm trying to persuade Aaron to return to the option 1) he'd
listed early in this thread (put all of these under the applications
folder) so that step can be avoided.

Aaron feels strongly that that would be a mistake, and articulated
a variety of reasons to that point.

That leaves issues around setting the screensaver and in activating
the configuration screen.  However, those functions do, I think,
lend themselves well to logical extensions of the existing xdg-screensaver
script, so I think that's just work.  We will also probably
have to do some thinking about legacy xscreensaver support, although,
in theory, the existing Picasa code should handle that acceptably.

Cheers,

Jeremy