Bug#921705: gnome: Please do not override debian-xterm.desktop file

[Ben Wong]

Has there been any move towards a consensus?

I read the bug linked to by the menus.blacklist file. While I don't think
Ubuntu is correct in how confusing the Xterm desktop file would be for
their users, I get that "simplicity" is part of their brand.

Debian, however, is not Ubuntu. From a Debian user's perspective, Xterm's
desktop file not working when the package is installed is confusing. Can we
please not attempt to second-guess what users want when they install xterm?
Note that Debian doesn't do anything similar for Thai X Terminal,
Multilingual Xterm, or any other terminal packages besides Xterm.

Or, at the least, can we make this something that is easily discovered and
fixed? The Gnome Menus blacklist doesn't appear to be mentioned anywhere in
Debian's Xterm documentation:

    $ zgrep -i blacklist $(dpkg -L xterm)
    $

Further, a local admin who does find the menus.blacklist config would be
wary of editing it for fear of causing an upgrade conflict in the future
requiring manual intervention. ("Configuration file changed by you or a
script. What would you like to do about it?")

Ubuntu's GNOME maintainer, Jeremy Bicha <jbicha at ubuntu.com>, suggested a
reasonable solution in bug #856858: create a separate package called
xterm-desktop which contains just the .desktop files for Xterm. It can be a
Recommended but not Required package so Ubuntu can simply choose to ship
without it by default, but if a user installs it by hand they'll get the
appropriate desktop files. Since it wouldn't be a config file, local admins
would not suffer from potential conflicts during package updates. And, by
including it explicitly in the package system, local admins might have half
a chance of discovering it and installing it even if the documentation is
not improved.

Thank you for your consideration,

Ben


On Tue, Feb 12, 2019 at 5:48 PM Laurent Bigonville <bigon at debian.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 08 Feb 2019 00:24:58 -0800 Ben Wong <bugs.debian.org at wongs.net>
> wrote:
>
>  > Dear Maintainer,
>
> Hello,
>
> [...]
>  >
>  > It turns out that some part of Gnome is creating a *second* desktop
>  > file which disables the first one by setting NoDisplay = True. This is
>  > extremely frustrating and unnecessary. The file is
>  > /usr/share/gnome/applications/debian-xterm.desktop
>  >
>  > I would like to tell you which part of Gnome is the culprit, but
>  > `dpkg -S` on the file says it doesn't belong to any packages.
>  >
>  > I can understand that certain distributions derived from Debian —
>  > those which believe minimalism equates to simplicity — may wish to
>  > hide "redundant" functionality like `xterm`. However, it doesn't make
>  > sense to hide xterm from Debian users. And if it did, it certainly
>  > should not be implemented in such a hard to discover way.
>
> [...]
>
> The preferred solution to fix this is to modify the
> /etc/gnome/menus.blacklist (that file controls the mechanism applying
> the blacklisting) and then run the gnome-menus-blacklist command.
>
> There is not real consensus in the team about changing this ATM
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Laurent Bigonville
>
>
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