app id in desktop file

[Ryan Lortie]

hi Sander,

On Fri, 2011-05-06 at 16:58 -0500, Sander Jansen wrote:
> Why? For what purpose?

There are quite a lot of reasons that I can imagine why this might be
useful.

For example, desktop environments could use it to match between the DBus
name acquired by the application (which would be the same as the
application ID) in order to match it with the desktop file.

My immediate reason for this, though, is that it was suggested to me by
Michael Vogt when I asked him if we could have metadata in apt mapping
between application IDs and package names (ie: so you can query the
package manager by app id).  Having the key in the desktop file would be
a good way to allow application authors to provide that information in a
semi-normalised format for consumption by scripts.

I think we have a lot of disjoint namespaces like wmclass, binary names,
package names, D-Bus names, GSettings schema names, GApplication IDs and
so on.  A lot of these are already the same (ie: equal to the D-Bus
name).  It would really nice if we could get a strong story for mapping
between these and the rest of them and this could provide that.

Cheers