Binary name in the desktop file

[Jerome Leclanche]

For the exact same reason menus and any kind of application runners
do. That is to say, not that much. It's needed for the rarer case
where the application accepts different parameters/different command
line depending on whether it has input args or not.
What bothers me here is that the concensus seems to be "Nobody has
needed it so far", but this is clearly false; there just seems to be
pressure not to need it, and call applications needing it "a bug".

I'm veering a little off-topic here but this is not the first time I'm
seeing things go down this way on this list. I understand the inherent
need to be conservative in a spec, but more often than not there is a
vicious circle building up of "We don't need it that much, so let's do
without it" -> "Now we need it more, but it's too late to change it".
I've now tried several times to contribute (including patches)
backwards-compatible improvements to the desktop file spec and
proposals either get ignored and left without comment, or a lot of
out-of-scope discussion happens. It doesn't help that there's no
protocol in place to actually contribute to the specs. It does seem to
be that changes only happen once kde/gnome needs them.
J. Leclanche


On Thu, Dec 26, 2013 at 8:59 PM, Jasper St. Pierre
<jstpierre at mecheye.net> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 26, 2013 at 3:54 PM, Jerome Leclanche <adys.wh at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I never implied the spec was wrong...
>>
>> I seem to be talking into the wind here, it's quite frustrating, so
>> I'm just going to leave this alone. If someone wishes to go forward
>> with adding an Environment key to the desktop file though that still
>> seems like an excellent idea.
>>
>> J. Leclanche
>
>
> I'm still genuinely curious why you think you need the binary name for
> intents.
>
>>
>> On Thu, Dec 26, 2013 at 9:06 PM, Dominique Michel
>> <dominique.michel at vtxnet.ch> wrote:
>> > Le Thu, 26 Dec 2013 20:37:56 +0000,
>> > Jerome Leclanche <adys.wh at gmail.com> a écrit :
>> >
>> >> 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.
>> >
>> > Not sure. The spec said the Exec key must be an executable followed by
>> > arguments. In your case, env is the executable, and all that follow are
>> > arguments to that executable. At least according to 'man env'.
>> >
>> > That imply the spec is right, but its implementation doesn't work in
>> > such cases.
>> >
>> > Dominique
>> >
>> >>
>> >> >
>> >> > 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
>> >> _______________________________________________
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>> >> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > xdg mailing list
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>
>
>
>
> --
>   Jasper