locale specific for .desktop

[Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman)]

On Wed, 17 Oct 2007 09:56:35 -0700 "Brian J. Tarricone" <bjt23 at cornell.edu>
babbled:

agreed. teh app can handle language specific codepaths and resources itself
based on $LANG/$LANGUAGE/$LC_ALL etc. if it doesn't and requires to pass in
cmd-line args so it can do so, it's a fundamentally broken app. it should be
fixed in the app, not the spec.

> Takao Fujiwara - Tokyo S/W Center wrote:
> 
> > How about a new "%l" since Exec line supports some field codes?
> 
> Why?  If the application launching the app in the Exec line knows what 
> $LANG is, then the application that gets launched knows too, and can 
> figure out what to do based on $LANG; there's no need to pass the locale 
> on the commandline.
> 
> You shouldn't be opening hardcoded paths in .desktop files anyway; if 
> you need to open different files depending on $LANG, you should write a 
> small helper application to figure things out for you.  If it's a 
> help-system type thing (for example), use an existing mechanism outside 
> of the desktop entry spec to do this.
> 
> > How about adding a new key OnlyShowInLang ?
> 
> I guess I still don't understand why this is necessary.  If a user 
> installs a piece of software that installs a .desktop file, my feeling 
> here is that they want to be able to see it regardless of what 
> LANG/LC_ALL is set to.  If it doesn't apply to their language at all, 
> then why would they have installed the app in the first place?  If it's 
> a distro-installed app that the user doesn't want, it should show in the 
> menu so the user is aware of it and can uninstall it if he/she so desires.
> 
> IMHO installing multiple .desktop files for an app (e.g. 1 per language 
> for some number of languages) is foolish, and just slows down menu 
> implementations.  The app itself should deal with the locale 
> appropriately by examining environment variables.
> 
> Personally, I'd prefer we didn't add complexity to the spec when the 
> same functionality can be handled outside it.
> 
> 	-brian
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-- 
------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------
The Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler)    raster at rasterman.com