Mime types, icons and .desktop files

Sean Middleditch elanthis at awesomeplay.com
Fri Oct 17 18:44:11 UTC 2003


On Fri, 2003-10-17 at 14:22, gemi at bluewin.ch wrote:
> Yes, of course the developers should include the information, but especially
> commercial providers don't do this. I want my distribution to provide .desktop
> files and icons for most common commercial applications. I created the desktop
> files myself and I would like to submit them somewhere. Mime-types for Mathematica
> notebooks should also be included in gnome-vfs.* or whatever.

Point understood.  But again, have you actually told the commercial
vendor about not having a .desktop file?  Perhaps if a user or two asked
them for it, they'd provide it.  Certainly, better desktop integration
can only help sales.

Attack the problem at the source, and only after that fails should the
distros try hacking around it.  (In hopes of avoiding the brain-dead
yammering that seems common from certain people because they only read
one sentence of a list post and carry on a 10 page rant based on that
alone, I'll again clarify that I'm *not* saying to never provide
pre-made desktop entries and such, I'm only saying to try to get it done
upstream first.  Which is, by the way, one of the stated goals of the
Fedora project.)

There's also a couple possible issues with Fedora doing this at all. 
For one, Fedora being all Free Software, it could be taken the wrong way
if commercial software is "hacked in."  Look at how the FSF won't even
link to Debian because they contain an official non-free archive,
despite the fact their main OS is all Free Software.  A kind of, "if
we're all about Free Software, why go out of our way to support non-Free
stuff made by vendors who can't just write their own .desktop file?"

Also, there could be legal repercussions in using a commercial
application's name and logo/icon without installing the software.  IANAL
tho.

If the above problems are indeed a blocker, and there are a good number
of vendors who refuse to "fix" their app to include proper desktop
integration, it could certainly be possible to make a
"broken-commercial-app-desktop-stuff" package in some non-US repository
or another to provide the desktop entries and MIME data.

> 
> 
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-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis at awesomeplay.com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.





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