Current desktop detection / app access

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Mike,

On Tue, 2004-05-18 at 14:04 +0100, Mike Hearn wrote:
> On Mon, 17 May 2004 23:15:15 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > What are the uses for DESKTOP other than the MIME handler stuff?
> 
> As Michael already said, it's useful for things like selecting whether to
> track Qt or GTK+ theming. There isn't really a good way to select this
> automatically currently and probably never will be. You could target one
> and not the other, but that's the kind of arbitrary decision large
> independent projects like OpenOffice shy away from.

	Right - so, it turns out that an increasing number of apps are needing
to know which desktop they are running under to do integration of
various sorts; icon, help, widgets, file-selectors etc.

	Since it seems there is an acute lack of willingness to assist in
standardising these easy wins, that help dramatically improve the user
standard; it turns out that hacks / patches are proliferating in this
area.

	The 'standard' variable on SUSE that people are using to do this is
'WINDOWMANAGER' (a misleading, and junk name of course); which includes
some path junk, and then either gnome or kde.

	I guess we're going to have to support that going forward instead of
something far more structured, pleasant and standardised.

	Sigh,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael at ximian.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot