RH BR74071 (Was: Configuring the Red Hat Linux desktop)

[Owen Taylor]

Waldo Bastian <bastian at kde.org> writes:

> On Saturday 14 September 2002 10:03 pm, Owen Taylor wrote:
> > I'm curious - are there particular reasons why you think that
> > "strip kde-" approach is better than what I suggested in:
> 
> RedHat would actually need to add "kde-".
> 
> >  http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=74071
> >
> > of optionally being able to specify a canonical DesktopName
> > in the desktop file?
> 
> Wouldn't you get the same name collisions in this canonical namespace then 
> that you tried to avoid in the first place?

I guess the question is whether looking up desktop files by 
filename base is a KDE-specific activity or something that
is interesting to other people installing desktop files
as well. 

If its KDE specific, then to make the canonical name approach
work, all we have to do is:

 - Make sure that the canonical name field is only added
   to KDE desktop files that we rename.

 - Make sure that we don't install other non-namespaced
   desktop files. (Something that we were already doing.)

If, we actually need a shared namespace, then there really
isn't any alternative to getting the KDE names changed 
upstream, though looking things up first as "kde-" then
unprefixed would help a bit, as you suggest.

(I don't see looking up desktop files by filename as something
that is particuarly interesting for GNOME at the moment)

Reasons in favor of my original proposal:

 - The "kde-" renames were meant as simply filename renames
   to get the files out of the way, and formalizing the
   use of that exact string by putting it into kdelibs
   seems a little strange.

 - There is no danger of applications accidentally referring
   to the Red Hat filenames instead of the real KDE 
   service names.

But I'm not sure those outweight the simplicity of your
approach.

> > Only application desktop files were renamed in our changes, not 
> > service desktop files, so there is a extra expense in having
> > to continually tack on "kde-" and check for that in addition.
> 
> You would only have to do that if the lookup with the name that was passed 
> failed and the name didn't start with kde- already.

Yeah, since its only extra lookups in the ksyscoca database,
it shouldn't be a big deal. Not quite sure why I was thinking
that it would be really expensive.

Regards,
                                        Owen