Extending the Desktop Entry spec for static app actions

[Jannis Pohlmann]

On Thu, 24 Nov 2011 17:43:17 +0000
Peter Brett <peter at peter-b.co.uk> wrote:

> 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*.

I haven't managed to read the previous mails properly yet but let me
throw in here that Xfce has repeatedly complained about Desktop Actions
being deprecated (for no particularly convincing reasons AFAIR) because
we found them to be very useful.

  - Jannis