[desktop entry spec] new FullName key

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On 08/09/2009 11:46 AM, Francois Gouget wrote:
> William Jon McCann a écrit :
> [...]
>> Also, if we were to use parenthesis in English (and I don't think we
>> should) we would want it to read "Ephiphany (Web Browser)".
> 
> So, stepping back just a bit, wouldn't it be pretty ugly if the Start 
> Menu was full of parentheses:
>       Ekiga (Softphone)
>       Empathy (Instant Messenger)
>       Epithany (Web Browser)
>       Evolution (Mail)
>       Iceweasel (Web Browser)
>       Wireshark (as root) (Network Traffic Analyzer)
>       ...

I'm not sure if anyone has asked this question in the thread yet, but:
why is it necessary to form some sort of "full name" from the Name and
GenericName fields to make a single string?  Other UI ideas have been
presented, such as a two-line scheme putting Name on the first line and
GenericName on the second.

For a menu, you could display Name as the menu item's title, and
GenericName as the tooltip.  Or for a larger menu, you might want to do
the multi-line trick.  Or even a single line display where Name is
displayed in normal font, and GenericName is displayed directly after it
in a smaller font, perhaps also a lighter color (sort of how Adium
displays contacts and their away messages in the contact list).

I acknowledge that concatenating the two fields is problematic for
translators, but I'm just not sure I see why it's even necessary.  Maybe
if someone is trying to do that, a re-think of the UI is in order?

>    evolution.desktop
>      Name=Evolution Mail and Calendar
>      GenericName=Groupware Suite

This kinda further support of my idea here.  Name and GenericName have
two different purposes and perhaps just don't go together.

Of course I'm not sure if my argument is now in favor of FullName or
against it.  In principle, I'm against it: I think it's ridiculous to
think that we need four (Name, GenericName, Comment[1], and now
FullName) different translated, user-visible ways to describe an app in
its desktop file.  This just makes me think that something has been
designed very poorly.  Maybe this is something that's too late to "fix,"
and we should just suck it up and add FullName, which I would view as an
unfortunate hack, but... can't we do this another way?

	-brian

[1] Which reminds me: how does Comment fit in here?  Can that be useful
to solve this problem?