Relative paths in .desktop files

[David Faure]

On Thursday 23 June 2011, Michael Thayer wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-06-23 at 11:58 +0200, David Faure wrote:
> > On Monday 18 April 2011, Vincent Untz wrote:
> > > 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).
> > 
> > From a KDE point of view: I support these additions to the desktop entry
> > spec and I volunteer to implement them in KDE.
> > 
> > (In fact I just implemented support for Exec=./foo here, but that's
> > useless by itself if it requires on a Path that has to be absolute, so
> > the next step is to implement Path=. if we all agree on that syntax).
> 
> Great.  Would you like me to post an updated patch against the spec, as
> in e.g.
> [ http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2011-April/011887.html ], or

Ah I seem to have missed some emails in this thread, thanks for the pointers.

I am definitely NOT in favour of Type=ApplicationRelative, this would require 
many more adaptations to the code in many places, and it moves a rather 
special case to a very proeminent place -- should we have 
Type=ApplicationWithPath when Path is set, and Type=ApplicationWithTerminal 
when a terminal should show up? Sorry for the reasoning by the absurd or 
whatever that's called -- my point is that there's a combinatorial issue in 
putting too much information into Type. This discussion is about a small 
change in the file describing an application, let's keep Type=Application.

> does [ http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2011-April/011882.html
> ] look good to you?

It says that "./" is relative to the location of the .desktop file. I can see 
the idea behind it, but then what happens when Path is set?

From an implementation point of view it's easier to chdir(Path) and then 
execute ./foo, but I can see how from a user point of view the idea is maybe 
more to say "resolve to a full path from the directory containing the .desktop 
file, then chdir(Path), then run the executable with a full path"?

I'm talking about a case like /home/dfaure/foo.desktop saying:
Exec=./foo
Path=/tmp

Should this do (cd /tmp ; ./foo) or (cd /tmp ; /home/dfaure/foo) ?

I'm guessing the latter is more useful, but maybe less expected.

(More useful because the first one can be done with Exec=/tmp/foo, since in 
that case we know about /tmp as an absolute path anyway).

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, http://www.davidfaure.fr
Sponsored by Nokia to work on KDE, incl. Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org).