[crossfire] desktop file: help request

[Lalo Martins]

On Mon, 05 Feb 2007 23:31:26 -0800, Mark Wedel wrote:
>   Looks good.  I wonder if we should include something to differentiate the gtk1 
> & 2 clients.
> 
>   On my system, I do have the icon with the gnome menus for the crossfire 
> client.  And all it says is 'Crossfire Client'.  If I hover my mouse over it, it 
> gives me a description, but still doesn't say anything about what client is.
> 
>   Often times on the channel, it is recommended someone use a particular client. 
>   As the things go now, other than the person running it, there really isn't 
> much client what client they would get.  Even calling it something like 
> 'Crossfire Client (Gtk2)' would be much more useful.

Since (a) this is the client that we recommend primarily and (b) people's
desktops will more likely be gtk2 than gtk1, I'd argue to leave it as it
is and change the gtk1 entry instead.

The guidelines for writing desktop entries out there generally call for
more descriptive, less technical details.  On that spirit, I used the text
from the homepage for the "comment" field, rather than the text in the gtk
client's desktop file.

Another alternative is to use Name and GenericName keys:

Name=Crossfire gtk-v2 Client
GenericName=Crossfire Client

Although that sounds to me like a stretch of the intended usage.

See also below for more on that.

>> 2: Hook up the build system to install this file to
>> $PREFIX/share/applications or whatever is the appropriate autotools magic.
>> I really don't have time to relearn what little autotools I used to know
>> to do this, so if someone who knows has a few minutes, please help here.
> 
>   This is in the RPM packaging.  The normal make install doesn't do anything 
> with the files.  The fact that for it to be of any use, it must be installed in 
> the global area, which has a pretty high probability of being outside of 
> whatever --prefix is set to is one reason.

I'm not sure about gnome, but I do have desktop files in
/usr/local/share/applications and xfce reads them just fine.  Maybe I
should check the freedesktop.org spec on that.  Can some ubuntu user
verify that a file in /usr/local works?  And KDE?

>   One problem is that I believe a uniquely named file is needed for each
> program.  So as things are now, with both the gtk and gtk2 using the
> same name, when installed, one will get overwritten.  The one in gtk2
> should be probably be renamed crossfire-client-gtk2.desktop - at least
> in this way, the name of the desktop file does match the executable.

I thought of that when writing the file, but I feel that if any file is
called crossfire-client.desktop, it should be the gtkv2.  Or we could
rename both to make it explicit.

>> 3: The icons should be the ones in pixmaps/*.png, but they are
>> corrupted -- probably need the right propset to be recognised as
>> binaries.  Could someone with the svn fu please do this one?
> 
>   This should now be fixed.

thanks.

>> 5: Again, they need to be hooked up to the build system, so that one of
>> them (presumably the higher resolution) gets installed to
>> $PREFIX/share/pixmaps/crossfire-client.png
> 
>   Is that to make them more easily available for users to find them, or
> something else?

That's because we're using an "unqualified name" on the icon field:

Icon=crossfire-client

That makes the menu system look for a file named crossfire-client.png or
crossfire-client.svg in the current icon theme, then in the icon path. 
It's the recommended way of doing it, so that icon theme authors can write
an icon for crossfire if they want.  The alternative is to write a full
pathname in this field, which would require "compiling" the file after you
know the installation prefix.

best,
                                               Lalo Martins
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