Michael Prokop wrote: > ACK¹ - good point. But then the behaviour should be adjusted in > other packages according: > > # grep -r 'Exec=.*bin/' /var/lib/menu-xdg/applications/menu-xdg/ | wc -l > 502 > > There does not seem to exist any consensus how that should be > handled generally. I can't find an according policy inside > http://alioth.debian.org/docman/view.php/30046/2/menu-one-file.html#s3.6 > as well. Do we care about the issue so it should become part of the > policy?
I would be happy to see it become part of policy, but I don't consider the issue important enough to try to convince people that their habits of hardcoding paths are wrong -- except in specific cases where it causes me trouble. When I discussed it with the menu maintainer, Bill Allombert recently, he said: | The full list of menu entries as of yesterday is there: | <http://people.debian.org/~ballombe/menu/menufiles.tgz> | | There are 619 use of /usr/games/ out of 686 games. | | There are 3866 commands, 3532 of them using an absolute path. | | Hard-coded path in command field seems to be an entrenched historical | practice. Strange stuff. Probably not worth the trouble to try to | change that now. > ¹ IMHO a clear and readable error message should be presented in > pdmenu if a binary can't be found then². You are the maintainer of > pdmenu as well: should I fill a separate bug report? Or do you know > what I mean and care about that on your own? Or don't you see that > as a bug at all? Since the menu files provide command strings that can be a whole shell command, or even a sequence of commands, pdmenu can't just search the path for the command string and show an error if it's not found. The best that could be done would be to run the command and display an error if it existed nonzero. But there are many reasons for a command to exit nonzero, not just because the shell couldn't find it in the path. Some commands might even exit nonzero after running more or less successfully. So it's not really possible for pdmenu to display a message that clarifies what's happening. -- see shy jo
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