Relative paths in .desktop files

[Michael Thayer]

On Thu, 2011-06-23 at 12:47 +0200, David Faure wrote:
> On Thursday 23 June 2011, Michael Thayer wrote:
> > 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).
I agree with what you said about the second variant being more useful.
In fact it seems more intuitive to me to specify all paths as absolute
(that is Exec too) if you really know that you are wanting to
run /tmp/foo.

Regards,

Michael
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