[patch] kdevelop desktop entry standard compliance

[Carsten Lohrke]

On Sonntag, 22. Juni 2008, Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> There are changes in there that might break things. Like removing the
> encoding, are you sure that since KDE 3.4 all KDE versions assume utf-8
> encoding of the files?

Likely, but I don't know for sure. My assumption is that the "only" users of 
KDE 3.4 are the customers of distributors providing long term support for a 
fixed set of packages. Given that KDE 3.4.3 has been released almost three 
years ago in October 2005 and that we speak about the 3.5 branch here, from 
my point of view thinking about users of KDE 3.4 beyond this limited and 
commercially supported degree is questionable.

> > -DocPath=kdevelop/index.html
> > +X-DocPath=kdevelop/index.html
>
> Is this used by khelpcenter? If so, does it still work with the changed
> property? If its not khelpcenter, who uses this entry?

Yes. The whole desktop file handling is held in the KDesktopFile class within 
kdecore. No application should parse the file itself and if it does, the 
application is broken. I just had a look at the KDE 3.4.3 code and yes, it 
reads X-DocPath as well.

> > -Exec=%{APPNAMELC} %i %m -caption "%c"
> > +Exec=%{APPNAMELC} %i -caption "%c"
>
> I guess this change was unintentional, right?

No. %m is, among other fields, considerered deprecated and therefore not part 
of the freedesktop.org desktop entry standard¹. Looking at kapplication.cpp 
you see that the mini icon is derived from the normal icon, if not specified. 
Given how many, many desktop entry files do not specify a mini icon, my bet 
is that the KDE 3.4 code doesn't look very different.

>> Note: I'm not saying the changes shouldn't be applied, but I'd like to
> make sure they don't break anything (and I don't have time to test that
> myself right now) as nobody's really working on KDevelop3 - so
> personally I think we should keep the amount of changes to the codebase
> small as none of us really keeps track of things there.

From my downstream point of view, I'd like to see KDE abide to the desktop 
entry standard, which unfortunately is not even the case for KDE 4, on the 
one hand because of using .desktop files for operations not within the realms 
of the standard - yes, I have a strict opinion here - and on the other 
because of having kept KDE 3 legacy keyword names, such 
as "InitialPreference", without prefixing them with "X-KDE-" as the standard 
requires. Heck, if KDE 4 were fine, I'd even think about doing the necessary 
patches - for .desktop files with Type=Application at least - to get the KDE 
3.5 (almost) standard compliant as well.

Proper documentation missing for these legacy .desktop files is another issue.


Carsten


[1] 
http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/desktop-entry-spec-1.0.html
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