Relative paths in .desktop files

[Michael Thayer]

On Sat, 2011-04-09 at 15:34 +0800, PCMan wrote:
> An easy workaround might be like this:
[...]
> Exec=%k/installer.sh
>
> The field code %k will be expanded to the location of desktop entry file.
> This can solve your problem, in a more or less dirty way.
I tried this out (Nautilus 2.32.0 in Ubuntu 10.10) and unless I did
something wrong it failed to work.  Among the past threads I found
discussing this, this posting by Waldo Bastian in 2006 -
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2006-August/006885.html -
sounds like he was happy with the idea of relative paths for icons:
[quote]
> Prefix with ./ sounds good:
>
> * If it starts with "/" it's an absolute path
> * If it starts with "./" is's a relative path
> * Everything else is a themed icon name
[end quote]
How would other (particularly GNOME) people today see this (for
executables too), and if favourably, where should I look for the code
which Nautilus uses to process desktop files?  I realise of course that
what I have in mind isn't quite the way .desktop files are used, but it
is sufficiently close that it seems to me silly to do something
separate.

Regards,

Michael

P.S. PCMan, I hope that you don't mind my CC-ing this back to the list.

> On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 6:28 PM, Michael Thayer
> <michael.thayer at oracle.com> wrote:
[...]
>  I immediately ran up against the
> > problem that all paths in .desktop files have to be absolute, which
> > obviously isn't an option here.
> >
> > So of course, the question is what the prospects are of getting this
> > changed (I'm also open to suggestions about better ways).  And since we
> > are drifting towards the old AppFolder thing here anyway (which I know
> > has been raised every so often here in the past, but never seems to have
> > gone anywhere), what about some convention which would let one put
> > a .desktop file in a directory and have it be a "default" executable for
> > that directory?
> >
> > Just to be clear, since this is not the most important problem we have
> > to solve I won't be able to spend a lot of time on it, but if someone
> > can give me good enough pointers I might find a bit of time to write a
> > couple of patches on my own time out of personal interest.
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