Desktop entry specification 1.0

[Posted August 8, 2006 by corbet]

From:		"Bastian, Waldo" <waldo.bastian-AT-intel.com>
To:		<xdg-AT-freedesktop.org>
Subject:		Desktop Entry Spec 1.0
Date:		Mon, 7 Aug 2006 19:35:20 -0700
Cc:		lsb-discuss-AT-freestandards.org, portland-AT-lists.freedesktop.org

I would like to declare the Desktop Entry Spec to be "1.0" after
proposing and including changes related to the following issues that
have been brought up on this list:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2006-April/0080...
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2006-June/00824...
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2006-May/008132...
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2006-April/0080...

I will propose patches to the spec for review for these issues over the
course of this week. If there are additional issues that should be
clarified before the "1.0" release, please speak up now. Goal of the 1.0
spec is to reflect existing practice by current implementations.

The current version of the desktop entry spec is 0.9.5 and can be read
here
http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/deskt...


Waldo Bastian
Linux Client Architect - Client Linux Foundation Technology
Channel Platform Solutions Group
Intel Corporation - http://www.intel.com/go/linux
OSDL DTL Tech Board Chairman

to post comments

Desktop entry specification 1.0

Posted Aug 8, 2006 15:52 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I don't see any good way of distinguishing this from other similarly-formatted files by magic, even though the specification says the system should handle files without the distinctive extension this way. Why not start the file with "#!desktop" or something of the sort, which would fix this issue as well as making it possible to use from the command line (provided you have a suitably-named executable) and justify requiring the execute bit to mitigate the security risk?

Desktop entry specification 1.0

Posted Aug 8, 2006 16:09 UTC (Tue) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] (2 responses)

What about a way for an application to inform callers that it wants to take the URL of a resource? Then it would be possible to click on a link to an iCalendar file, RSS feed or other HTTP resource, and hand its processing off to an external program, without increasing the proliferation of fake protocol schemes such as hkp://, feed://, webcal:// and so on.

Desktop entry specification 1.0

Posted Aug 8, 2006 16:12 UTC (Tue) by pj (subscriber, #4506) [Link] (1 responses)

why not submit the whatever to the W3C or whomever to make them non-fake?

Desktop entry specification 1.0

Posted Aug 8, 2006 17:17 UTC (Tue) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

The same reason why it's not a good idea to have an SSL and a non-SSL version of every protocol scheme; we end up with millions and millions of protocol schemes, when we only need one (http).