Binary name in the desktop file

[Liam R E Quin]

On Thu, 2013-12-26 at 21:15 +0000, Jerome Leclanche wrote:
> 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.

If you go to the gnome Applications menu and launch a program, it has no
file arguments (it might have arguments, e.g. -gui to show the graphical
user interface, but no files).

I'm unclear about the case where this isn't sufficient.

[...]

>  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".

This is always a difficulty with standards.

The way around it is to try and make extensible standards, but the
desktop spec has only limited extensibility.

>  It does seem to
> be that changes only happen once kde/gnome needs them.

Or presumably other desktop environments if they can give a clear
explanation of why something is needed, e.g.
* what exactly does the user do
* what currently happens
* what do you want to happen
* how do you think that should be achieved

instead of throwing jargon around (intents, runners) :-)

I'm getting the impression runners are some kind of KDE plugin thing,
but I'm lost as to why they are relevant to a cross-desktop spec;
I don't know what intents are at all in this context.

Xross-desktop standards really only work when multiple desktops need to
do something, and there's a need to share part of the implementation.

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