Relative paths in .desktop files

[Michael Thayer]

Hello Vincent,

Thanks for your comments.

On Mon, 2011-04-18 at 10:56 +0200, Vincent Untz wrote:
> Le lundi 11 avril 2011, à 18:06 +0200, Michael Thayer a écrit :
> > Thanks for the answer.  Please find a patch against
> > desktop-entry-spec-1.1.xml below.  I hope that that, together with my
> > initial posting, makes my intentions slightly clearer.  As I said, I
> > would also interested in other approaches to achieve the same thing.
> 
> [...]
> 
> > --- desktop-entry-spec-1.1.xml	2011-04-11 17:50:02.350865289 +0200
> > +++ desktop-entry-spec-1.1.xml.new	2011-04-11 17:57:39.126810018 +0200
> > @@ -429,7 +429,10 @@
> >  	    <entry>
> >            Icon to display in file manager, menus, etc.  If the
> >            name is an absolute path, the given file will be
> > -          used. If the name is not an absolute path, the algorithm described
> > +          used. If it starts with "./" it will be treated as a path
> > +          relative to the directory containing the desktop file and
> > +          the given file will be used. Otherwise, the algorithm
> > +          described
> >  	  in the <ulink
> >  	  url="http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards/icon-theme-spec">Icon
> >  	  Theme Specification</ulink> will be used to locate the icon.
> 
> I must admit I don't really see which use case we're trying to cover
> here. Can you give a concrete example of where you'd have a bundled
> application like this?
As mentioned at the start of the thread, my immediate use case is for
the installer for the VirtualBox Guest Additions, which are delivered as
a virtual CD image which "appears" in a virtual machine when the user
selects "Install Guest Additions", and which is normally auto-mounted by
the guest at a mount point which can't be cleanly predicted.  I would
simply like it to look prettier on X11/fd.o-type systems - in the
current iteration the user can click on the icon of a shell script to do
the installation, but it would be nicer to have a more recognisable icon
and the other things that a .desktop file describes very nicely.

> FWIW, I'd consider ./ to be relative to the path defined in the Path
> key (which could be ./ to tell that it's the base directory of the
> .desktop file).
Tricky one.  On the whole I would say that the initial working directory
and the directory where the application files are located don't need to
be related, but I can't immediately see how a relocatable application
could usefully specify an initial working directory.

My initial googling when I was looking for solutions to this suggested
that other people might also have uses for it.  I don't have any links
handy just now, though I could look for some if you like.

> I think we'd also want to explicitly mention that ../ is
> not supported.
Of course, that raises the question as to whether supporting ../ might
be useful for someone.  But it would seem reasonable not to support it
until there is a concrete use case.

By the way, I assume you saw
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2011-April/011885.html too.

Please let me know if this answer clarified things for you a bit.

Regards,

Michael
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