Identifying applications from windows to .desktop files

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le dimanche 22 février 2009 à 15:12 +0100, Vincent Untz a écrit :
> Le dimanche 22 février 2009, à 12:41 +0100, Milan Bouchet-Valat a écrit :
> > To sum up, I can see two ways of solving the issue:
> > 1) Enforce what is already the custom: no big modifications except for a
> > handful of "non-standard" apps (requires only a new paragraph in the
> > Desktop spec)
> > 2) Add the concept of app identifier in a different way, which implies
> >      - a new field in the Desktop spec
> >      - possibly a new WM property for all windows
> 
> Isn't it simpler to add a _NET_WM_DESKTOP_ENTRY_NAME property that
> should contain the name of the relevant desktop file?
Yes. That would be a variant of 2)b. But it still shares the drawbacks
of this solution, namely that we need to update all apps one by one.

Another problem is that while this property would have to be set from
the source code, .desktop file names are set by distributions. So at the
end your proposal would force distributions to use the filename
specified by upstream or to patch the source. To avoid the burden of
such useless patches, they would adapt their filenames. And we would end
with solution 1), with the complexity of a new property to get passed in
non-standard apps (think of making this enter OO.o), and without the
advantage of a simple standard.

That's how I see it, at least.. ;-)