Problems with NoDisplay and menu editors

[David Faure]

On Monday 11 May 2009, 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.
> 
> The only other thing I can think to do is patch all of these
> applications so they don't put any Categories in their NoDisplay files
> so they end up in the Other menu and don't bother users so much.

Sounds like we need NoDisplay-as-set-by-user and NoDisplay-as-decided-by-programmer?
Which would amount basically to checking if the local file (in the user's home dir) has NoDisplay
(then allow to show it again, it was hidden by the user) or if NoDisplay comes from a
global file (e.g. /usr) then it is probably a "system" desktop file which wouldn't make sense
in a menu in any case. Does this seem like a good solution?

The alternative would be to actually use a different key; in fact preventing people from
unhiding some desktop files could simply be done with NoDisplay[$i]=true (where [$i] means
immutable, i.e. cannot be overridden in a local config file). We "just" have to patch all
NoDisplay desktop files we provide to actually say that.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Qt Software @ Nokia to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).