[ubuntu-mono] [Bug 236602] Re: No applications available for photo editing if Gnome is not installed

[Harald Sitter]

All very confusing and certainly requires investigation.

First of all I cannot imagine that KDE got a quite well working component to implement the desktop-enty-spec (namely kbuildsycoca4) and GNOME depends on update-desktop-database only. The mentioned spec does not even enforce a policy were every package that comes with a destkop file needs to invoke said command. So, considering a 3rd party developer deploys an application with desktop file and doesn't know that he should call update-desktop-database (Since it is not mentioned in the spec) GNOME would never know about his application.
Comparing that to the automated scans of kbuildsycoca4 (to find new desktop files) and its inode notification registration (to get notified about updated desktop files) makes GNOME appear in a rather bad light TBH. So, someone who knows his way through GNOME would be very welcome to explain if this is really the way GNOME does things.

Anyway, as for the fix for GNOME applications. No, we should not open
bugs against gimp and friends. Because:

Technically the desktop-entry-spec suggest a two way communication module.
First you have the parsing component that interacts with the desktop files and the mime cache to build a list of applications etc. and on the other side you have the output component that provides the necessary information to the application.
Assuming that no one would be developing GNOME applications if they had to implement the output component into every application rather than one libary (update-desktop-database creates just the database, but still somehow this database needs to be accessed and processed so that its information can be used within the actual application), there must be some GNOME library that handles the interaction with the application. And this library should depend on desktop-file-utils.
Because what use does the library have if you don't have a database it can read from? ... clearly a case of Dependency ;-)

That is however only an assumption.

-- 
No applications available for photo editing if Gnome is not installed
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/236602
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