Proposed improvement to the Desktop Entry Specification: Relative icon paths

[Rodney Dawes]

I don't think your proposal is the best way to solve your use cases. For
one, having .directory files in each directory is deprecated. Secondly,
a lot of multimedia software already has methods for setting album art
for music and movies. It would probably be better to specify some
standard method for multimedia players to use, and then have file
managers also support that method. Using a .directory file seems
redundant, and adds a lot of disk access requirements that are not
really necessary to have.

For your second use case, I'm not sure what you mean. A .desktop file
that is not intended to go into a standard applications directory is
almost entirely useless. Perhaps you should look at some of the
software bundle proposals and implementations, and work with using
those, instead. Another option is the xdg utils scripts, to install
the .desktop file and icons in the appropriate places. I can only
presume that your uninstalled application also intends to not follow
the Icon Theme and Icon Naming specifications either. And I don't see
setting the directory's icon as useful really. Setting an icon for the
actual executable would be much more useful, though elf binaries do
not have resources like win32 binaries do.

-- Rodney


On Tue, 2008-09-23 at 10:01 +0200, Magnus Bergmark wrote:

> Use-cases
>      1. I use a lot of .directory files to make directories containing
>         a movie have the movie poster as the icon. This behaviour
>         could apply to any form of media, like comic books, music
>         (album art) and photos.
>      2. A vendor might want to bundle an icon to a piece of software
>         they're distributing to go with a .desktop file which are not
>         to go in the desktop menu and therefore are still located in
>         the application directory.