[lokisetup] more menuitem voodoo

[Stéphane Peter]

> > Dropping modern .desktop files in /usr/share/applications works for both
> > GNOME2 and KDE(3?), as it's part of the new FreeDesktop.org standards.
> > I haven't followed Setup development lately, so forgive if this is a
> > dumb question - you guys *are* keeping up to date with those standards
> > where possible, yes?
> 
> I did some work for rh8 a few months ago which supports part of the 
> freedesktop standard, but it isn't generalized enough.  Really the menuitem 
> code needs a good rewrite, to take advantage of the new standards and 
> fallback to older specialized setups as needed.  Volunteers?  :)

True, it does need a good rewrite, and this will probably happen for the
2.0 branch.

While these FreeDesktop.org are welcome, the truth is that at the time
that most of this code was written, there was no such standard in
effect, and back at Loki we had the need to support much of these old
distributions with no conformance to any standards.
 
> Of course, this might be a solved problem already.  Winex has pretty good 
> menuitem code, but they might just be carpet-bombing all the directories.  
> What we need is a "libmenuitem" project :)

It would solve a lot of these problems. For instance, Mandrake (and
Debian, since they took it from them) has a unified way to update menu
items for all desktops and window managers. We already support this, but
this is still far from universal.

> > Another thing Setup might want is to have the installer use a suffix
> > like .install or something.  Then, GNOME/KDE can drop a MIME item for
> > .install telling it to invoke it with /bin/sh or whatnot, even without
> > the executable bit set, so download-and-install in graphical
> > environments doesn't require low-level UNIX permissions knowledge.  Just
> > download, and click.  ^,^
> 
> That would be nice.  On my kde system, it knows the installer file is a shell 
> script but still refuses to execute it unless the executable bit is set.  

Is .install an "official" type for executable files on any desktop ? If
you are talking about .run files, then the big issue is that all these
"magical" detections of the file type often end up being a problem
because of the binary nature of these files... If .install is not
already supported, then why not use .run as a new MIME type ?

-- 
Stephane Peter
Sr. Software Engineer
Codehost, Inc.