[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#639996: Bug#639996: Bug#639996: fastdnaml is not able to start in GNOME

[Charles Plessy]

Le Thu, Sep 01, 2011 at 03:50:27PM +0200, Andreas Tille a écrit :
> > 
> > The freedesktop menu entries could be corrected by making them start a
> > terminal, but I think that it goes against the vision of our GNOME maintainers.
> 
> If there is a way to do so (which I do not know) then we should do
> exactly this.  I have no mind reading abilities and so I can not guess
> the vision of our GNOME maintainers, but what else should be done for
> command line programs than opening a terminal?  The only way would be to
> not provide a freedesktop entry at all and this should probably not be
> the method of choice.

Hi Andreas,

I had several discussion on debian-devel on that subject. Here are two
links to such threads:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2007/07/msg00579.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/02/msg00388.html

I think that the general conclusion is that, while the freedesktop menu is
expected to be a bit selective in the applications it contains, our packages
have a sufficiently specialised user base that we should make our own choices
by ourselves :)

Still, for the command-line programs, I tend to start a terminal and type them
in there, instead of opening a terminal running them through a menu entry.  In
most of the cases, the files to analyse are not in the root of my home
directory anyway.  So I think that we should not have freedesktop entries that
start a terminal.  Since we have many more Debian menu entries doing this, I
also think it would be consistent to keep them and add the missing ones.

In any case, I think that the most important is to be consistent accross our
packages.

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan