locale specific for .desktop

Rodney Dawes dobey.pwns at gmail.com
Sun Oct 21 19:07:01 PDT 2007


On Thu, 2007-10-18 at 17:55 +0900, Takao Fujiwara - Tokyo S/W Center
wrote:

> Some of the applications are used on one locale only, e.g. Chinese
> dictionary application, Japan road map application.
> The situlation is, those applications are used for one country only,
> the native persons require to show the application by default, the
> native person usually uses one locale only.
> But we don't have suitable applications for all locales so
> the .desktop needs to be shown on one locale only.

No app should ever show for only one locale. I have friends that live
all over the world. I would want to see a map application, or
dictionary, no matter what. If the application does not have sufficient
translation to other languages, that is a problem with the application,
not the user, the user's environment, the XDG specs, or anything else.
If your problem is you lack translations, then you should make the
translation department at Sun fix it, not the XDG Desktop File spec.

> > 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.
> 
> The problem is we don't have any way to handle this case.

We do have a way to handle it. It is called packaging, and system
lock-down settings.

-- dobey




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