Comment 27 for bug 635223

On 28 September 2010 11:40, Damjan Jovanovic <email address hidden> wrote:
> As the writer of winemenubuilder, the part of Wine that builds
> freedesktop menus, I have this to add.

Cool. Nice to have you in the discussion! :-)

> The menu structure is driven by the per-shortcut .menu files under
> ~/.config/menus/applications-merged. The .directory files in
> ~/.local/share/desktop-directories and the .desktop files in
> ~/.local/share/applications/wine/... are referenced from the .menu file
> to describe and thumbnail the subdirectories and shortcut. Thus the
> .menu file is crucial, it is what places the icon in the right place,
> and it is the absence of the .menu file that causes the .desktop entry
> to appears under "Other" in Gnome. If you want to build a single flat
> menu structure without subdirectories, good luck: most uninstallers for
> Windows applications are all named "Uninstall". Mint 8 tried the single
> flat menu idea and it didn't work that well for Wine.

Ok - this is nice to know. I actually have the icons working out ok,
in my testing branch for the places. It's just the launcher tiles
which are wrong, i haven't even tried fixing that yet. So I'm
confident that we can get this to work throughout.

The tricky part is figuring out what to do with overly generic
application names like "Uninstall". Atleast Songbird has
Name=Uninstall Songbird and a custom unistaller icon - so that should
be easy for users to distinguis in the UI. Just goes to show that not
all apps are problematic in this regard at least :-)

> The poorly researched "desktop-id" idea is, in my understanding,
> fundamentally broken and will regress not only Wine but Java and any
> other framework that launches through a layer of indirection (eg.
> .desktop file launched "java -jar ..." or "/bin/sh ...", which then
> starts the real application).

I am not sure I totally understand what you're getting at here? Is it
that you simply don't believe that you can assign unique identifiers
to applications, or is it that the matching of window -> .desktop file
is not ever gonna work?

Window matching is definitely a tricky business - but ditching the
entire idea because it's hard to get all the details right seems a bit
radical to me. Even though it might not be perfect in the first go, I
believe we can get there with some work.