Proposal: Inharitance for Desktop Entry Spec

[cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis)]

On Thursday 17 April 2008, Dan Winship wrote:
> Vincent Untz wrote:
> See the autostart-related threads in
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2006-October/thread.html
> and
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2007-January/thread.html

> In particular, this message, where Waldo points out how allowing one
> .desktop file to inherit from another can cause problems:
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2006-October/007003.html

The relevant part of the latter seems to be:

> > Which at the same time introduces panel-like problems, take
> > konsole.desktop for example: changing the Exec=konsole line to
> > Exec=xterm without changing X-DCOP-ServiceType results in funky
> > behavior. If you change one part and then later a system upgrade changes
> > another part of the .desktop file the result is quite unpredictable.

> (I came out of that thread convinced that .desktop file inheritance was
> a bad idea.)

I don't buy that reasoning:

First, a per-key granularity doesn't stop you from copying over the 
whole .desktop file when making a change. 
-> You don't actually lose anything by having per-key granularity

Second, having something defined in different places is usually a 
bad thing and brings it's own set of problems. Having per-key granularity 
allows you to just define things once.
-> IMO this is a clear win, for those of differing opionion see my first 
point
-- 
Cheers, cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis)
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