[desktop entry spec] new FullName key

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On 07/21/2009 08:20 AM, Frederic Peters wrote:

[...]
> It would already be possible if Name and GenericName were used in a
> consistent way, but as we put whatever we wanted to be displayed in
> the menu in Name, we find ourselves with the Name embedding the
> GenericName, such as:
>    Name=Brasero Disc Burner
>    GenericName=Disc Burner
>
> A first proposal was to fix our desktop files (in our official suites
> there are only three occurences of this problem) but the issue is
> broader (looking at other popular GTK+/GNOME applications, it appears
> at least in Banshee, F-Spot, Gnumeric, Liferea, Rhythmbox, etc.) and
> it is not certain all of them can be fixed.

Sure they can!  Submit patches upstream.  If they get rejected, then the 
apps look stupid when displayed in GNOME Shell, and the app authors 
eventually will feel shamed into fixing them.

> Therefore comes this proposal to add a new FullName key, which would
> typically be a combination of Name and GenericName, but could also be
> a variant, for example:
>    Name=Glade
>    GenericName=User Interface Designer
>    FullName=Glade Interface Designer
>
> As this doesn't change the meaning of existing fields this change
> doesn't have any impact on existing desktop files, and programs that
> consume them.
>
> How does it sound ?

It sounds like a failure to address a problem in the correct way, and 
instead paper it over with a band-aid in an official spec.

(Not that I'm not guilty of doing similar things from time to time, but 
at least I don't try to get them standardized!)

	-brian