hi Dylan, Thanks for your remarks.
On Sat, 2011-05-07 at 07:13 -0700, Dylan McCall wrote: > We're basing some very important, system-wide (sometimes even global) > things on simple names that are not being qualified in any way. This is a pretty important point and not really a strictly philosophical debate either. We have some situations like epiphany where multiple packages have the same name and we need to do some tricks (like renaming to epiphany-browser) to dodge issues. > I totally agree with you about the bother associated with switching. > Maybe encourage an X-oldId key as a transition for existing desktop > files over the next year? This is an interesting proposal to deal with the problems associated with switching without causing too many problems. When it comes right down to it, the desktop file name that a package selects is strictly their own choice. They can elect to take the namespaced approach or they can stay with the other way. In case they elect to rename, we could provide an 'AlsoKnownAs' type of key to help the transition and deal with the cases that Marty raises. The burden here is on implementations, of course and I don't know that we could expect really rapid implementation or anything like that. Strictly speaking, I'd be happy with just having the unique ID as a key in the file. This might be a more pragmatic approach and one that gives people more freedom to pick the path they prefer. Nothing would stop people from renaming their files as well, so they could do that too and gain both advantages. I'd probably do that for my own packages. I will write a patch to the spec to add the ApplicationID= key and also a recommendation that maintainers should consider renaming their desktop files to be properly namespaced. We can discuss 'AlsoKnownAs' at this point if it is considered sufficiently helpful. Cheers _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
