XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP

Bastien Nocera hadess at hadess.net
Thu Jul 14 08:42:55 PDT 2011


On Thu, 2011-07-14 at 11:36 -0400, Michael Terry wrote:
> Hello!  I've seen the idea of a XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP environment variable 
> tossed around a few times on this mailing list, but I don't see it in 
> any spec.
> 
> Historically, most desktop file parsing libraries were tightly tied to a 
> desktop and were able to assume which XDG desktop they were in (e.g. 
> libgmenu assumes 'GNOME').
> 
> However in Unity, it uses most of the same libraries but still wants the 
> ability to respect OnlyShowIn=Unity.  So there's a need for those 
> libraries to detect which desktop is running.  The easiest/quickest way 
> is to use an environment variable like XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP.
> 
> I have some ideas on how such a variable might work:

What's the use for this when you could add a "set_desktop_name()"
function in the front-end that uses that library?
Is it of any use apart from libgnome-menus?



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