Removing OnlyShowIn / NotShowIn from desktop actions

[Jerome Leclanche]

On 3 July 2013 09:38, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:

> On Tuesday, July 2, 2013 20:48:55 Ryan Lortie wrote:
> > > or might implement them differently.
> >
> > This is a good point that I hadn't considered before.  Maybe gnome-shell
> > would show them in a place that Transmission considered inappropriate.
>
> Should the application care about this at all? I'd suggest "no" for the
> following reasons:
>
> * desktop shells may adjust their behaviour, and expecting application
> developers to respond to the current behaviour of the shell makes it nearly
> impossible (multiple versions of the same shell with different behaviours,
> having to propagate changes out to each and every application, etc.)
>
> * the application developer is unlikely to test with all possible desktop
> shells out there (giving poor results either due to the app dev only
> listing
> environments they did test with or adding shells they haven't tested with
> but
> which work poorly with the defined actions)
>
> * new shells may arise over time causing a lot of work for app devs should
> they want to join in the fun (alternative: they just ignore the "only in"
> entries)
>
> * this opens the door to a cheap way of creating "works better in
> <shell>..."
> feature sets, which is nonesense
>
> to make life consistent and easy for application developers, i'd suggest
> that
> if a shell shows these actions, they simply do so in a way that is
> sensible.
> application developers should be able to sleep well at night knowing that
> the
> shell does what it does and does it well.
>
> we do this in other areas and it works very well in practice.
>
> tl;dr -> "only in" makes no sense unless the action is actually shell
> specific
> and not application specific. i'd go so far as to suggest that shell
> specific
> actions are unmaintanable in practice and would drop that 'feature'
>

Couldn't have put it better myself. Anyone who's dealt with cross-browser
development is probably having a deja vu right now.
I can see how OnlyShowIn could be potentially useful, but at the same time,
is it really something that should be supported?


>
> --
> Aaron J. Seigo
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>

J. Leclanche
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