menus, Name/GenericName

[Ivan Gyurdiev]

On Mon, 2005-03-28 at 06:47 -0600, Rex Dieter wrote:
> Dariusz J. Garbowski wrote:
> 
> > "Movie Player", "PDF Viewer", "Email", "Browser", whatever... These 
> > names, although perhaps more helpful for those who are unfamiliar or 
> > less familiar with Linux software, are quite meaningless for those who 
> > know what app exactly they want to run. What will start when I choose 
> > "Some player" or "Some viewer" thing? Worse, it changes from release to 
> > release and from distro to distro... This is one of the reasons why I 
> > find myself avoiding menus completely and still running everything from 
> > commandline -- at least I know what I run ;-)
> 
> Amen brother.  I've harped on that several times.
> 
> IMO, the correct/proper solution is already available.  The (free) 
> .desktop standard already allows for each app to have
> Name=
> GenericName=
> 
> So, if Evolution's case,
> Name=Evolution
> GenericName=Email

IIRC that was also rejected, because it didn't work with translations
when combining the two names (left-to-right, right-to-left text?)

For non-defaults I think it was decided:
Name=Evolution Email
GenericName=Email  (or whatever the translation is).

Then Name would be displayed. Too bad that convention's also not being
followed.

See, this looks perfect to me, because you should be able to sort on the
GenericName field and have things show up next to each other. I
suggested sorting, but nobody cared last time. OTOH would sorting on
GenericName create the same language problems as combining the two
names?

-- 
Ivan Gyurdiev <ivg2 at cornell.edu>
Cornell University