[desktop entry spec] new FullName key

[David Faure]

On Wednesday 22 July 2009, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > > The solutions you propose add clutter to the menus, in the form of
> > > parens or dashes, just to cover up the fact that there is no good way to
> > > combine the two fields that does not cause translation problems.
> > 
> > If you don't like parens or dashes, use the more modern two-line solution,
> > with the name on the first line and the genericname on the second line.
> 
> Ok, maybe I should have mentioned newlines as yet another workaround.

There are 7 valid ways to use the current stuff (those are not workarounds, sorry),
and you want to introduce an 8th way which requires a new field.
Fine, it's indeed a different way, so indeed it cannot be done perfectly with 
the current fields, I agree about that.

But you presented all this as a workaround for broken .desktop files, that
was bound to get you negative reactions. Those broken desktop files
MUST BE FIXED, even if we add a new key to the spec, for the sake of
implementations which do want to use Name and Generic Name separately
rather than an all-in-one FullName.
Adding FullName should NOT be seen as a way to avoid fixing the desktop files.
Your email said exactly that, and that's what I'm completely against.

But if the one who adds FullName to every desktop file also fixes up the
Name and GenericName keys of the file in order to stop the duplication
nonsense there and actually follow the spec then I guess I withdraw my
objection against FullName.

> Why is it so hard to acknowledge that if you want to show a piece of
> text as one unit in the interface, it needs to be presented as one unit
> to the translators ?

Why is it so hard to acknowledge that fixing the existing stuff is more important
than introducing yet more new stuff? ;)


David (going on vacations until August 04, so probably last reply until then)

-- 
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).