RFC: make menu implementations tolerant of vendor changes

[Vincent Untz]

Hi,

Le mercredi 11 avril 2012, à 15:32 -0400, Bill Nottingham a écrit :
> In Fedora, we've had the issue where some desktop files were incorrectly
> shipped with a vendor prefix. Due to the fact that the file name often
> is used as a key, we then are 'stuck' with either maintaining the bad
> vendor prefix indefinitely (potentially incompatibly with other distributors
> or upstreams), or changing the vendor prefix (breaking edited menus, user
> shortcuts, and so on.).
> 
> One solution would be to have implementations be tolerant of vendor changes
> in desktop file names - if they don't find a file with the vendor prefix, to
> try again without the vendor prefix. Is this something that's worth adding
> as a recommendation for implementations via XDG, or are there better
> solutions?

To be honest, my gut feeling is that Fedora should just bite the bullet
and suffer for one release. It's much simpler than adding more
complexity to the whole system.

But assuming we'd want to add such a recommendation: how would the
implementations know what is/was the vendor prefix? [1] What happens if
there are more than one vendor prefix in use on the system (OS vendor +
ISV)?

Vincent

[1] this might sound trivial if you assume your data stay on the same
system, but people might share their data on systems from more than one
vendor...

-- 
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