Extending the Desktop Entry spec for static app actions

[Peter Brett]

Giovanni Campagna <scampa.giovanni at gmail.com> writes:

> Il giorno gio, 24/11/2011 alle 16.44 +0000, Peter Brett ha scritto:
>>
>> Could you please compare and contrast your proposed approach with the
>> way KDE 4 implements this kind of functionality?
>
> I didn't know KDE 4 implemented this, and therefore have no knowledge
> of the details.  Rapid googling brought me this:
> http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Creating_Konqueror_Service_Menus
> which seems very similar to the proposed system. In fact, they seem to
> use: [Desktop Entry] Actions=(string list)
>
> [Desktop Action %s]
> Name=(localestring)
> Exec=(string)
> Icon=(string)
>
> The primary difference I see is that they allow merging multiple
> desktop files to create one list of actions, but I see that their
> original use case was the context menu for a file manager, not an app
> launcher.
>
> Btw, with either this or the Unity syntax, I was not able to get
> multiple actions in the k menu, so if a KDE developer could step in
> and tell me where I'm totally wrong, it would be appreciated.

It would be nice to avoid a repeat of the controversy that happened
earlier this year w.r.t. libappindicator/StatusNotifier and GNOME, and I
think the best way to avoid that would be for the GNOME and KDE and
Unity (and XFCE etc.) folks to collaborate and present a proposal
*together*.

Even if some of the other DEs don't support exactly this feature yet,
it's possible that they might be working on something similar or have
plans to implement such a feature in the future, so why not get as many
potential interested parties to sign off on the proposal as possible?

I'm sure you would agree that having a single approach that everybody's
happy to support would help make upstream application developers like me
more comfortable.  Having to do things differently depending on which DE
a user is running is a pain.

                        Peter :-)

-- 
Peter Brett <peter at peter-b.co.uk>
Remote Sensing Research Group
Surrey Space Centre