Hello everyone. Over the past few years Ubuntu has been using desktop entries to fetch applications from its repositories and display them in the software center. All packages with a desktop file are considered applications; they appear with their entries' Name, Icon, and Comment in the software center, while other packages are hidden as "technical items".
It turns out this approach is problematic. * Some applications have extra desktop launchers. Wesnoth, for instance, comes with a map editor. From the perspective of an app store, however, 'wesnoth.desktop' and 'wesnoth-1.8_editor.desktop' are just one app. * Some applications have no primary launcher. Wine, for instance, comes with a notepad, a configuration launcher, a registry editor, a program uninstaller, a help app, and a drive browser. None of these embody "Wine" as one thing a user is interested in installing. * Finally, at a package level, it is often advantageous to package desktop launchers separately from the main package. So an app store ends up installing a 'app-common' package instead of the entire application. In the past we've manually maintained an entry blacklist and package->app mapping for the software center. It's become clear that this solution won't scale. There's been some discussion around a solution at the package level: # https://dev.launchpad.net/ArchiveIndex#Overrides However, I think it would be much cleaner to extend the Desktop Entry standard to include *generic, non-executable descriptions of a user application*. Such a file might look like this: [Desktop Entry] Version=1.0 Type=MetaApplication Name=Foo Viewer Comment=The best viewer for Foo objects available! URL=http://fooview.com Icon=fooview MimeType=image/x-foo; # And perhaps..... Package=fooview Screenshot=http://fooview.com/screenshot.jpg Description=[Longer description of fooview here] Would any other parties be interested in modifications like this landing in the Desktop Entry spec? _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
