cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis) wrote:
On Wednesday 01 June 2005 06:46, James Richard Tyrer wrote:
It was brought to my attention (more than once) by a user that KDE
and GNOME each install their own version of:
/etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu
{path varies from system to system}
Clearly this doesn't work if you have both GNOME and KDE installed
on the same system. Obviously, what you want is for the GNOME file
and the KDE file to coexist and be used by their respective
desktops.
this is actually just one example of a broader problem that we will
run into more and more in the future (so solving it at the level of
the menus spec is definately not the way to go): - XDG standarizes
stuff - KDE, Gnome, XFCE, ... all come with their own view on good
defaults for the standarized stuff - KDE, Gnome, XFCE now
potentially conflict as they all put those defaults in the same
standard place.
Could you give us some examples of other conflicts? I have not found
any yet.
This is a packaging/distro issue however,
If we leave it to the distros we will have a dozen different solutions
(some good and some bad) and that is not why we have standards.
there's no reason why the standarized stuff of each desktop's
packages should be placed in /etc/xdg,
Perhaps not, but it *is* the default.
it's perfectly possible to install each desktops view on defaults in
a sepperate XDG_CONFIG_DIR/XDG_DATA_DIR.
That's off course only half the solution, next you need a standard
way of managing the contents of the XDG_*_DIR environment variables.
For Debian there exists desktop-profiles (See [1]) which does just
that, I'm not aware of what (if anything) other distro's have for
that.
I presumed that this would go in the startup script for the DeskTop
(e.g. "startkde").
IIUC, this could be addressed by installing GNOME and KDE with
different installation prefixes. However, since some distros (e.g.
FC) install them both with a prefix of "/usr", this isn't *the*
solution.
a distro doing that has broken packaging, if 2 packages provide
different versions of the same file they should conflict
I never much liked using an "/opt/<package>" directory, but it is
part of the standard and some distros do use it.
The spec says that the file is to be installed:
$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/menus/applications.menu
This seems to be less than satisfactory in this case. I don't even
seem to have that environment variable set on my system so both KDE
and GNOME must have a default.
see the base-directory specification (default equals /etc/xdg if
absent)
Yes, I said that they use a default. Perhaps I should have said '*the*
default'.
<snip menu-specific solution>
[UNSNIP]
<<
Or, the existing path could be [for example]:
/etc/xdg.<desktop>/menus
and the existing environment variable XDG_CONFIG_DIRS or the DeskTop's
default could be set accordingly.
Since this modifies the "xdg" directory, it is not a "menu-specific
solution".
So, as I said, we could either have a solution that modified the "menus"
directory, that *would* be a solution just for the menu, or we could
modify the "xdg" directory and have a general solution.
--
JRT
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