Binary name in the desktop file

[Jerome Leclanche]

On Thu, Dec 26, 2013 at 8:33 PM, Liam R E Quin <liam at holoweb.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 2013-12-26 at 10:56 +0000, Jerome Leclanche wrote:
>> I'd really like to be able to get the binary name from desktop files
>
> What if there's no binary, e.g. a shell script or a python-based program
> with a UI?
>
> What about a Java program,
> java -cp .... -jar ...
> ?
> If you just run "java" you won't see much.
>
>> (eg a way to "start without any argument"). Current implementations
>> rely on getting the first word of the Exec key OR replace %f etc by
>> nothing, but that fails for things such as these:
>>
>> Exec=env WINEPREFIX="/home/adys/.local/share/wineprefixes/default"
>> wine start /ProgIDOpen chm.file %f
>
> What exactly fails here?
>
> Like others I've no idea about "runners" or "intents", but maybe that's
> because I don't run KDE? I'm not sure that a cross-desktop environment
> facility should hard-code environment-specific ideas. But if it's a
> concept useful elsewhere then it may make sense.
>
> I *think* you might really be asking for a way to run a program without
> opening a specific file, is that right? It's not about having no
> arguments such as "-c"...
>
> If so, that might be a good idea, and should indeed be a separate entry.
> But doesn't the menu entry already give you this?

See a couple of posts above; the menu entry suffers from the same
issue. Either way, I can just do the same thing as menus/launchers do
without arguments but as I said, some apps will still be broken.
I dislike the philosophy of "it's on the app developer to fix it";
this is a pretty obvious shortcoming of the spec.

>
> Liam
>
> --
> Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
> Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
> Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
>



J. Leclanche