.desktop file

[lemmit]

Hi

I have been using XnView occasionally and it's a pretty sweet piece of software. Thank you to the developer

A small glitch though - I just installed the latest Linux version (on Ubuntu Breezy), but nothing appeared in the menu. Looking at the .desktop file in /usr/share/applications I noticed, that it is missing and Encoding=UTF-8 line. After adding it manually, I now have a menu entry. I'm not sure about the standard, but the Encoding will probably not hurt anyone and make life easier for some.

And also another request to consider - does the XnView developer know about the autopackage project (www.autopackage.org). It is a distribution-neutral packaging framework for Linux, supporting user installs, automatic handling of menu items and in the upcoming 1.2 version also a sophisticated workaround for the problem of routine C++ ABI breakage on Linux. So all in all, XnView autopackage would make the software easier to install and easier to package - no more different versions for different flavors or versions. Maybe the developer would care to have a look - the people behind autopackage are mostly very friendly with 3d-party developers.

The best,

L.

[Guest]

A small glitch though - I just installed the latest Linux version (on Ubuntu Breezy), but nothing appeared in the menu. Looking at the .desktop file in /usr/share/applications I noticed, that it is missing and Encoding=UTF-8 line. After adding it manually, I now have a menu entry. I'm not sure about the standard, but the Encoding will probably not hurt anyone and make life easier for some.

You are right. The specification requires an "Encoding=" line, and the encoding must be UTF-8 or Legacy-Mixed, but the latter is strongly discouraged:

http://standards.freedesktop.org/deskto ... 01s04.html
http://standards.freedesktop.org/deskto ... 01s05.html
http://standards.freedesktop.org/deskto ... t/apd.html

By the way: There is a package called "desktop-file-utils" with a program called "desktop-file-validate". Current result:

Code: Select all

$ desktop-file-validate /usr/share/applications/xnview.desktop
/usr/share/applications/xnview.desktop: error: required key "Encoding" not found
/usr/share/applications/xnview.desktop: warning: boolean key "Terminal" has value "0", boolean values should be "false" or "true", although "0" and "1" are allowed in this field for backwards compatibility

Therefore, simply adding "Encoding=UTF-8" is the way to go.

And also another request to consider - does the XnView developer know about the autopackage project (www.autopackage.org). It is a distribution-neutral packaging framework for Linux, supporting user installs, automatic handling of menu items and in the upcoming 1.2 version also a sophisticated workaround for the problem of routine C++ ABI breakage on Linux. So all in all, XnView autopackage would make the software easier to install and easier to package - no more different versions for different flavors or versions. Maybe the developer would care to have a look - the people behind autopackage are mostly very friendly with 3d-party developers.

I don't think this makes sense.

- autopackage bypasses the native package manager (dpkg, rpm, whatever)
- there are already generic tarballs that should work on all distros
- XnView has practically zero external depencencies, so it doesn't need a package manager
- XnView consists of executables only (no libraries), so it should be easy enough to install for everyone
- there is "alien" which works perfectly fine for XnView