Formal complaint concerning the use of the name "System Settings"

[Thomas Lübking]

Hi Ambroz, (and everybody else of course)

Am Tue, 26 Jul 2011 20:39:27 +0200
schrieb Ambroz Bizjak <ambrop7 at gmail.com>:

> Yes, that is what this extension would allow. It's a powerful tool,
> and any powerful tool can be abused.
If an application has a different name under different DEs, that's not
"abuse" but error by design (sorry, i don't mean to be offensive)
Leaving aside systemsettings, what if i tell somebody to run marble
("it's like google-earth!") but he then starts some solitaire game
(because there is eg. a solitaire game like this on "OtherDE" and
marble is named "KDE's google-earth clone" ;-) he'll be pissed and i'll
be lost.

> This doesn't solve the original problem.
Yes it does. They will certainly not share the same binary name or
we've a _real_ problem. (Or not, since there will be only one target
for the application link anyway ;-)

It would also be possible to choose "System Settings" as generic name
and "KDE Settings" as non generic one. The latter would only be
presented for clarification (if the runner wanted)

> It is also harder to implement, and the behavior is non-obvious.
a) "i don't think so"
b) that's not an excuse.

> My proposal is not tied to English in any way. 
No, but it is tied to the ppl, knowing about an and resolving an actual
clash which i doubt translators can be expected to be.
> The individual Specific-DE- 
I wasn't restricting my concerns to the "we already know about an
existing clash in LANG=C".
The very same issue can _easily_ arise onlny in a particular
translation.

To repeat the example, if translator (a) translates the KDE .desktop
file, translator (b) the gnome one and they don't coordinate, they
might pick the very same translation for "control center" and "system
settings" (unless as mentioned there's a trademark in the string what
renders the entire approach useless since that could be added
automatically anyway)
This might happen even though there are similar strings in German
(surprise, since english is just degene... strike that ;-) because as
mentioned the translators might have other references in mind.
In other languages there might not even be any variants of this item.

-> If clashes are (apparently) an existing problem, they need to be
avoided at the end of the chain where they can be spotted for sure and
not on the start where we just hope we (and everybody else!) did
everything ok.

Cheers,
Thomas