Bug#726446: jugglemaster: missing icon entry in menu files and no desktop files Jessie Release Goal

[Markus Koschany]

On 28.05.2014 17:50, Helmut Grohne wrote:
> On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 10:56:49AM +0200, Markus Koschany wrote:
>> Indeed that's an upstream issue but of course we can provide a patch or
>> make suggestions. Please find attached my proposal in icons.tar.xz. I am
>> not an artist myself, but usually a screenshot and some simple cropping
>> and manipulation with Gimp does the trick. That's always better than
>> nothing.
> 
> Thanks for your effort, but I find these icons (specifically the xpm
> versions) unreadable. At those scales screenshots simply don't work. In
> a typical menu they would be indistinguishable from black and white
> squares respectively. I'd rather see a name than these icons to
> represent JuggleMaster. I also see no use in using radically different
> icons for these packages, because they really are just two interfaces to
> the same tool.

Sorry I forgot that the menu files were already O.K. Please ignore the
xpm icons then. However I still recommend to use the 256x256 icons for
desktop files unless someone else provides better looking ones.

[...]
> I failed to put .desktop files to good use (beyond validating them) so
> far, maybe you can enlighten me? Is there some particular package I need
> to install? (Of course I do not deny the usefulness of .desktop files to
> others!)

You don't have to do anything if you run one of the four big desktop
environments and I can't tell you more about them what isn't already
written down somewhere else on the web.

>> major desktop environments support desktop files and without a desktop
>> file jugglemaster is not visible on Gnome3, KDE, Xfce or LXDE. Since
> 
> Well, my observation is that menu files work with all window managers I
> tried and desktop files work with none of them. I acknowledge that I am probably
> not mainstream (and that is why I added desktop files), but .desktop
> support is obviously nowhere near ubiquitous.

As I said Openbox is a notable exception. Since the four major DEs
attract the majority of users and they support desktop files only, they
are de facto ubiquitous. There are also no other distributions besides
Debian which support menu files.

Thus said I have been using all sorts of window managers and desktop
environments since I installed my first Linux distribution in 2002 and I
enjoy the diversity. Currently I am using GNOME 3, I3 and Openbox most
of the time. Perhaps that made it easier for me to accept that there are
different needs and perceptions.

>> desktop files are widely adopted by all other distributions, they are de
>> facto the standard for displaying menu entries across different DEs and
>> WMs and should be supported by all applications.
> 
> No, they are not the de facto standard. There currently are two
> competing standards, because neither standard works for everyone. The
> aim should be moving to one standard (probably .desktop), but I do not
> see that happening (and I won't be doing that work, because the "old"
> standard works for me).

Please note that desktop files will be recommended by the next update of
the Debian Policy. Desktop files are already standard for all other
distributions. I personally support both standards as long as the menu
package is in Debian because I see the current benefits for both
systems. My attitude is that I even support something that I have no
current need for when it is clear that something is useful for others;
desktop files are clearly useful to others

>> Nevertheless packaging xdg-menu would be a good idea but this is
>> unrelated to the request at hand to ship desktop files and should not
>> block this bug. In fact having desktop files is a pre-condition.
> 
> No, having a way to use .desktop files is a requisite for testing them.
> Otherwise they are just random garbage dropped in random places.
> Support for using them must come first. That's why the blocking
> indication.

Desktop files work and they are hardly random garbage. I have a hard
time to understand your reasoning here, especially why adding them is
blocked by the introduction of another package when it is clear that
they can be used already.

Markus

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