Bug#850427: Suggestions (inoperative desktop files)

[Jonathan Dowland]

On Sun, Jan 08, 2017 at 02:06:56AM +0100, Simon Howard wrote:
> One (entirely valid) criticism is that not even an error message popup
> appears. It should be the case that a GUI error message is displayed if
> Zenity is installed. So a simple thing to do would be to add Zenity as a
> Suggests: line for the package.

I think that's what the quake stuff does. I at least remember using or working
with zenity when working on game-data-packager. It still means you have an
inoperative desktop entry, albeit with a useful error message, but we would
(or could or should) need to look at translation issues for the message too.

> If you instead go with the .desktop approach, please bear in mind that it
> not just /usr/share/games/doom you should check - there's also
> /usr/local/... and ~/.local/share/games/doom.

I had a shower thought this morning (in Brno, where it is snowing :))

 * don't install the desktop files into the correct place by default in
   the package; put them in a private place.
 * write a shell script that checks those locations above for each engine
   and copies the desktop file into place if they are satisfied (this means
   duplicating and syncing up with chocolate-doom's iwad finding code, but
   that should be relatively stable)
   * do we need to kick something so desktop environments notice?
 * possibly write the inverse script too
 * hook those scripts into these places:
   * package preinst and postrm (with the inverse behaviour)
   * possibly a dpkg trigger but that would mean modifiying GBP too I think
     (and freedoom/dm) so IWAD packages emit the trigger
   * possibly hook into debconf so it would/could be run by a dpkg-reconfigure
     (maybe a dpkg configure step would be sufficient and we would not need to
     preinst/postrm too)
   * document/expose it so that the user can run it by hand if they manually
     install an IWAD (not necessarily via dpkg package) after installing the
     engine package

-- 
Jonathan Dowland
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