Current desktop detection / app access

[Mark McLoughlin]

Hi Michael,

On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 17:27, Michael Meeks wrote:
> 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.

	We had a private email discussion in June where I was left with the
feeling that

  a) you had re-read the original mails and now understood the reasons
     why we thought that a "hang your hack here" $DESKTOP environmental
     variable would do more harm than good

  b) you understood that ignoring the point people were trying to make 
     and doing things like accusing them of "acute willingness to
     assist" just frustrates any possibility of having a productive
     discussion

     and

  c) you were going prepare a specification for a solution to your 
     specific problem along the lines of $DESKTOP_LAUNCH or the solution
     Waldo proposed

	Was I talking to a different Michael ? :-)

Cheers,
Mark.