Problems with NoDisplay and menu editors

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On 08/05/2009 03:25 PM, David Faure wrote:
> On Sunday 12 July 2009, Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
>> On 2009/05/11 06:00, Travis Watkins wrote:
>>> On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 5:50 AM, David Faure<faure at kde.org>   wrote:
>>>> On Monday 04 May 2009, Travis Watkins wrote:
>>>>> Personally I'd rather go with the change to the meaning of
>>>>> Hidden as it makes the most sense to me (Hidden means it is hidden in the menu)
>>>>> and would still be compatible with the current menu implementations
>>>>> since they don't show Hidden items anyway.
>>>> This would break compatibility with all installed .desktop files which say Hidden=true,
>>>> with the intention of saying "this file is deleted". We cannot change this meaning,
>>>> for penalty of introducing 1000 bugs. This is a big veto from me for changing the
>>>> meaning of a 10-year-old .desktop file key, even though it was misnamed.
>>>>
>>>> I don't actually understand the problem you're describing. In all three cases
>>>> we want "mime handling but no appearance in the menus", and NoDisplay=true
>>>> does exactly that. So what's the problem you're trying to fix? Too much crap
>>>> showing up in the menu editors as "no display"?
>>> Exactly, I'm trying to figure out how to let users hide/unhide things
>>> without making them see the 3 copies of Banshee and 2 copies of
>>> Brasero and whatever other junk shows up.
>> Why can't we bring back the 'Desktop Actions' portion of the desktop
>> entry spec (or was that in the menu spec?)?  This easily solves the
>> issue of an app installing>1 .desktop file, and seems to work rather
>> well in practice (Thunar still implements it even though it was removed
>> from the spec a while ago).
>
> KDE does, too. (it was in the desktop entry spec). And indeed I didn't
> know it had been removed (!). Ouch. If two implementations still have it
> and want it, why was it removed?
> Hmm. Well. We use it, but not for app desktop files it seems; rather
> for actions on devices, and for servicemenus (rmb / actions / foo in
> file managers, but using kde-specific .desktop files).
>
>
> But anyway I don't see a relation with the current thread.
> Desktop Actions was about specific named actions, not about the
> issue of hidden-from-the-menu associations between an app
> and a mimetype. Which is NoDisplay=true, but indeed a menu editor
> would probably not want to show these as potentially showable,
> so I suggested NoDisplay[$i]=true (immutable setting).
> Didn't get an answer on that though ;)

It's possible that I've forgotten what the original issue was, but from 
talking to Travis on IRC months ago, I seem to remember that the problem 
was that some apps install multiple desktop files, marking all but one 
as invisible, and the invisible ones do things like set up mime 
associations with a particular variant of Exec=.  Travis' problem (IIRC) 
was that these extra files show up in the menu editor as hidden, when in 
reality we don't want to see them at all (in the menu editor).

Bringing back Desktop Actions (I think!) would remove the need for apps 
to ship multiple desktop files, instead just shipping one with the 
various other stuff in it.  If the original DA spec gets us most of the 
way there, but not all the way, we could both bring it back and add 
whatever magic is necessary to make it work.

Of course, as I said, I could be mis-remembering what the issue was, and 
I don't have time right now to re-read the thread.

	-brian