Unity & OnlyShowIn

[Didier Roche]

Le mercredi 29 juin 2011 à 18:09 +0100, Michael Terry a écrit :
> Hello, Desktop folk!
> 
> 
> Currently, Unity pretends to be GNOME in some ways.  Unity is a
> registered XDG environment
> (http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/apb.html) but no
> tools look for its value, and few .desktop files use it.
> 
> It would be useful for various reasons (my immediate concern is only
> showing one date & time control center panel) to be able to
> write .desktop files that say OnlyShowIn=Unity.  This is bug
> https://launchpad.net/bugs/803519 .
> 
> So there's several tools that need to support that.  But before I
> patch those, I'd like most of the GNOME .desktop files to read
> "OnlyShowIn=GNOME;Unity;" instead of "OnlyShowIn=GNOME;".
> 
> I've done a few (nautilus, gnome-control-center), but I'd appreciate
> if when ya'll do an upload (say, for 3.1.x upgrades), you could take a
> few minutes and patch the .desktop file too.  Additionally, send it
> upstream to GNOME.
> 
> You can see examples in the bugs and patches linked to from
> https://launchpad.net/bugs/803519
> 
> Then later (maybe next week), I can patch gnome-menus to respect the
> key.

I more or less (as the dead patch you saw) tried to do that in the UNE
time. The thing is that we have a lot of desktop file to patch, even in
the default install.

It was mainly to start some applications depending on the session (like
UNE starting some services background that the desktop doesn't). We
finally got that in diverging the xdg autostart path and so, preferred
that solution.

But here is different from the behavior you want to achieve. For
instance, on my machine (not cleaned, of course, but with minimal
non-default apps): grep OnlyShowIn /usr/share/applications/* | grep
GNOME | grep -v cache | wc -l
43

43 (missed 42, obviously ;)) is a lot. Should less packages though (most
of games come in one package). So, if you upload gnome-menus to respect
this key straight away, we will have a lot of missing apps in the Unity
environment. Not talking about 3rd party applications and getting a lot
of bugs like "why apps xxxx isn't shown in Unity?".

So, what I tried to define with vuntz at the time was to make some time
of inherited session concept. However, we got a lot of issues like real
"GNOME" application not compatible with Unity, and so, using
NotShowIn=Unity. I guess I have the code somewhere in my disk for that,
handling thoses cases. As previously told, as there was the xdg fix, I
decided to not pushing that, but maybe we should reconsider?

Didier