Relative paths in .desktop files

[David Faure]

On Friday 24 June 2011 13:21:50 Michael Thayer wrote:
> 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.

Agreed.

Did anything come out of this? Should the suggested patch for the spec be 
amended to clarify the issue above?

Any objections from main implementors to supporting "./" in Exec and Icon 
fields?

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, http://www.davidfaure.fr
Sponsored by Nokia to work on KDE, incl. KDE Frameworks 5