Communication (was: Desktop file spec improvements (was: Binary name in the desktop file))

[Dominique Michel]

Le Sun, 29 Dec 2013 11:15:23 +0000,
Jerome Leclanche <adys.wh at gmail.com> a écrit :

> I'm editing the subject because we seem to be going back and forth on
> different points and it's leading to serious confusion.
> 
> I remember TryExec now. TryExec partly fits one of my needs, although
> there remains the issue of starting without args.
> Starting without args is something a lot of xdg implementers do:
> Menus, application runners, launchers... All of these assume that
> %F/%f/%U/%u can safely be replaced by an empty string. We all know
> this isn't always the case. Now, can "this isn't the case" be
> considered an application bug? Let's put it this way: would you be
> comfortable telling people "The entire way your application is run
> (possibly even on all platforms you support) is broken because the
> xdg spec wants it this way"?ay the app's
> developers. More often than not, packagers/maintainers write it and
> have to deal with a dead or unresponsive upstream.

From my experience as both upstream and packages maintainer, that's not
true. I write ebuilds for the gentoo pro-audio overlay, and each time I
contacted upstream about missing or non compliant desktop files, I
always get very good responses, and at the exception of only one case,
the fixes I suggested, or some variant, was included into the next
release. The same is also true for less obvious issues. In general,
upstream like very much when a package maintainer or an user show them
he care about their software by reporting an issue.

In fact, lack of communication is a real issue with distributions
developers. Very few of them take the initiative to contact upstream
when they can solve a problem themselves, and much more often than
the inverse, the only mean I have to know their concerns with the 2
projects I am managing is to search for distributions related bugs with
google. Hopefully, it is not many of them.

With users, that's more complicated because many of them are less
skilled than developers, and their reports can sometime be very
confuse, which can make hard to figure out what is going on.

For the rest, I will just follow the discussion.

Dominique