Bug#1098988: spring: desktop entry relies on PATH with name clash

Petter Reinholdtsen pere at hungry.com
Fri Feb 28 07:46:34 GMT 2025


Control: tags -1 + patch

[Chris Hofstaedtler]
> It is unclear how to best resolve this. Personally, I think you
> should install your program into /usr/bin, picking a new name.

While that would be a good solution, I suspect it should involve a
change upstream to ensure consistency across Linux distributions.

A less intrusive solution would be to patch the desktop file, ie like this:

diff --git a/cont/freedesktop/applications/spring.desktop b/cont/freedesktop/applications/spring.desktop
index ce592432..40fbd70d 100755
--- a/cont/freedesktop/applications/spring.desktop
+++ b/cont/freedesktop/applications/spring.desktop
@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ MimeType=application/x-spring-demo;x-scheme-handler/spring;
 Comment=An open source RTS with similar gameplay to TA
 Comment[de]=Open-Source Multiplayerstrategie
 Comment[it]=Un gioco di strategia in tempo reale multi giocatore simile a TA
-Exec=spring %u
+Exec=/usr/games/spring %u
 Icon=spring
 Terminal=false
 Type=Application

This will of course not help command line users with both packages
installed, which might be surprised what is first in PATH.
-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen



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