locale specific for .desktop

[Rodney Dawes]

On Wed, 2007-10-10 at 00:09 +0900, Takao Fujiwara wrote:
> Could you check the following is the explanation of Icon for Desktop
> Entry:
> 
> 	 Icon to display in file manager, menus, etc. If the name is an
> absolute path, the given file will be used. If the name is not an
> absolute path, the algorithm described in the Icon Theme Specification
> will be used to locate the icon.
> 
> My understanding is your point is applied in case the name is not an
> absolute path, isn't it? And it seems the value of Icon is
> localestring in Desktop Entry.
> Is it right?

"Values of type localestring are user displayable, and are encoded in
UTF-8."

Encoding in anything else is not per the Desktop Entry spec, and
behavior is undefined. What if the user's locale does not match what is
in the file? There is no way to know what encoding it should be in. The
Encoding key is deprecated and should not be in the .desktop file,
either.

The Desktop Entry specification also extends its reach beyond the
applications menu, and therefore specifies a super-set of what is
actually needed for the apps menu. An absolute path is not a URI, but
only a path. You /can/ specify an absolute path, yes. It is preferred
that you specify a name matching the name of the application's binary
executable, and that this icon is looked up in the theme. If a user
wants to theme that icon with a custom icon, they can very easily
create a theme in $HOME/.themes and place an icon there, because the
behavior is specified, and one doesn't generally have to go find the
.desktop file, figure out what the file name specified is, whether
it's an absolute path, or not, edit the file as root, or copy the
file elsewhere and edit, etc...

Perhaps we need to specify a "usercustom" theme, or similar, that is
searched before every other theme, so that users can simply place icons
here, rather than having to create their own themes. This would also
give a standard location for user interfaces which let users pick custom
icons for desktop files, to place such icons, to be looked up via the
theme.

-- dobey