Unity & OnlyShowIn

[Michael Terry]

On 06/30/2011 09:24 AM, Didier Roche wrote:
> You can see examples in the bugs and patches linked to from 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?

So the problem is that what you really want is three XDG names defined: 
GNOMEBase, GNOMEShell, Unity.  Then the inherited scheme would work.

But GNOME's not going to go for that (in their mind, there is no such 
thing as GNOMEBase).

But let's say we try to muddle ahead with inherited sessions.  What do 
you do with .desktop files that actually are GNOMEShell-specific?

Let's take gnome-datetime.desktop (c.f. indicator-datetime.desktop).  It 
has "OnlyShowIn=GNOME;".  You *could* then go and add "NotShowIn=Unity;" 
but it's only actually valid to have one or the other of "NotShowIn" and 
"OnlyShowIn".  Neither the spec nor the tools support both.  There's no 
way to express "GNOME but not Unity" with inherited sessions.

Since GNOME is going towards more and more Shell-specific functionality, 
this will be more of a problem.

I figured it made sense to bite the bullet and fix up the .desktop files.

-mt