All right, let's solve these .desktop issues forever

[Scott Ritchie]

As of right now, I'd estimate that over half of our users are using Wine
from a terminal window to launch their applications, largely because
their window manager doesn't put Wine's Start Menu entries into their
applications menu.

Wine's been making .desktop files for some time, however it seems like
they're being put in the wrong place.  There's supposedly a proper,
standard place to put them (or there should be), and perhaps a hack can
be put in at the package-maintainer level, but in any case this is a
pretty big usability issue at the moment.

I'm pretty confident that someone here knows the answer to how things
should be, and I'm also pretty sure it's a fairly simple change to make.
Either way, we need to have a discussion about it - what's the next step
here?

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie

[Dan Kegel]

On 8/9/06, Scott Ritchie <scott(a)open-vote.org> wrote:
> As of right now, I'd estimate that over half of our users are using Wine
> from a terminal window to launch their applications, largely because
> their window manager doesn't put Wine's Start Menu entries into their
> applications menu.

Indeed.
> Wine's been making .desktop files for some time, however it seems like
> they're being put in the wrong place.  There's supposedly a proper,
> standard place to put them (or there should be), and perhaps a hack can
> be put in at the package-maintainer level, but in any case this is a
> pretty big usability issue at the moment.
>
> I'm pretty confident that someone here knows the answer to how things
> should be, and I'm also pretty sure it's a fairly simple change to make.
> Either way, we need to have a discussion about it - what's the next step
> here?

I started up xfce today,  and was surprised to see all the menu items
for all the windows apps I'd installed over the last few months show up.
Sadly, this was wrong, since I'd done "rm -rf .wine" many times.
It'd be nice if the .desktop files were stored inside ~/.wine so they could
go away when that directory did :-(

Hrmf.  Lemme ask the Portland folks.
- Dan

[Damjan Jovanovic]

--- Scott Ritchie <scott(a)open-vote.org> wrote:
> As of right now, I'd estimate that over half of our
> users are using Wine
> from a terminal window to launch their applications,
> largely because
> their window manager doesn't put Wine's Start Menu
> entries into their
> applications menu.
>
> Wine's been making .desktop files for some time,
> however it seems like
> they're being put in the wrong place.  There's
> supposedly a proper,
> standard place to put them (or there should be), and
> perhaps a hack can
> be put in at the package-maintainer level, but in
> any case this is a
> pretty big usability issue at the moment.

Look at the Portland project, they have cross-desktop
(Gnome, KDE, XFCE) tools for installing .desktop
files. Maybe we should integrate them into wine?
> I'm pretty confident that someone here knows the
> answer to how things
> should be, and I'm also pretty sure it's a fairly
> simple change to make.
> Either way, we need to have a discussion about it -
> what's the next step
> here?
>
> Thanks,
> Scott Ritchie

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com

[Dan Kegel]

On 8/9/06, Damjan Jovanovic <dj015(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Scott Ritchie <scott(a)open-vote.org> wrote:
> > Wine's been making .desktop files for some time,
> > however it seems like they're being put in the wrong place. ...
> > Look at the Portland project, they have cross-desktop
> > (Gnome, KDE, XFCE) tools for installing .desktop
> > files. Maybe we should integrate them into wine?

Jeremy and I were at the meeting where the Portland project
got started [1], and we've been following it off and on with great
interest.   I just posted a question about how xdg-desktop-menu
would work compared to what Wine already does [2], let's see what they say.
- Dan

[1] http://kegel.com/osdl/da05.html
[2] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/portland/2006-August/000806.html

[Travis Watkins]

On 8/10/06, Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com> wrote:
> Jeremy and I were at the meeting where the Portland project
> got started [1], and we've been following it off and on with great
> interest.   I just posted a question about how xdg-desktop-menu
> would work compared to what Wine already does [2], let's see what they say.
> - Dan
>
> [1] http://kegel.com/osdl/da05.html
> [2] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/portland/2006-August/000806.html

No need for any of that, just put 1 file in
~/.local/share/applications/ and it should work fine. Alternatively
you could put them somewhere inside ~/.wine and set $XDG_CONFIG_HOME
(put the files in ~/.wine/menu/share/applications and set
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME to ~/.wine/menu/). I'm pretty sure you could add a
line to some dot file (.xinitrc?) and have this set on login.

-- 
Travis Watkins
http://www.realistanew.com

[Jan Zerebecki]

There is also the issue that our menu items don't know about
WINEPREFIX.

And that the menu items don't get deleted when the windows lnks get
deleted. Thu I guess that is less of a problem when they are stored
somewhere under $WINEPREFIX .

On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 03:14:28AM -0500, Travis Watkins wrote:
> No need for any of that, just put 1 file in
> ~/.local/share/applications/ and it should work fine. Alternatively
> you could put them somewhere inside ~/.wine and set $XDG_CONFIG_HOME
> (put the files in ~/.wine/menu/share/applications and set
> $XDG_CONFIG_HOME to ~/.wine/menu/). I'm pretty sure you could add a
> line to some dot file (.xinitrc?) and have this set on login.

Why not put a link from ~/.local/share/applications/wine to
~/.wine/menu/freedesktop/ and create the .desktop files there?
That way we can have multiple links to our .desktop files and we
can have a alternate formats of menu links, if the need arises
(as it was in the past or still is).

To fix the WINEPREFIX thing we could use
~/.local/share/applications/wine/$choosen_prefix_name as link and
some other stuff. But is it wanted that we solve this in wine?



Jan

[Dan Kegel]

On 8/10/06, Jan Zerebecki <jan.wine(a)zerebecki.de> wrote:
> Why not put a link from ~/.local/share/applications/wine to
> ~/.wine/menu/freedesktop/ and create the .desktop files there?

I like that idea a lot.  But once we create the symlink, there's no
need to change where we create the .desktop files, they'll go
in the right place.

The Portland folks say that xdg-desktop-menu will install the
.desktop file both in ~/.local and in the legacy locations .kde and .gnome.
Wine should probably use xdg-desktop-menu someday to do its
menu installation, but for now, it should probably just add .desktop
entries into ~/.local in addition to where it now puts them.
(Anyone know why it doesn't?)

[Tom Booker]

On 8/10/06, Scott Ritchie <scott(a)open-vote.org> wrote:
> As of right now, I'd estimate that over half of our users are using Wine
> from a terminal window to launch their applications, largely because
> their window manager doesn't put Wine's Start Menu entries into their
> applications menu.

Not only are they doing this because of a lack of shortcuts being created,
but also because 95% of the time (ion my experience anyways), even when
binfmt_misc is enabled, wine doesn't add it's entry to the proper place to
make .exe files run in wine, so when i double click on one, it does
nothing.  Matter of fact, out of all of the times I have installed wine,
under various distro's, I think it has done this properly only ONCE.

Fixing that would make me happy, as I can create the .desktop files myself.

-- 
Thanks

Tom

Check out this new 3D Instant Messenger called IMVU.  It's the best I have
seen yet!

http://www.imvu.com/catalog/web_registration.php?userId=1547373

[Mikołaj Zalewski]

I was investigating the menu problems and now I'm back so I could try 
to fix it. The problem is with the support for the new freedesktop.org 
standard. In it the /usr/share/applications and 
~/.local/share/applications contains a flat list of applications while 
the menu structure is controlled by XML files. Thus adding items to 
~/.local/share/applications is harder than adding them to legacy 
directories as the XML files would need to be updated.
  There is however a possibility to add an XML file that includes a 
"legacy" directory where the menu structure is given by the directory 
structure. That would be the easiest way to quickly fix this problem. 
I've attached a simple menu file that could be created by 
wineprefixcreate. It should be copied to 
~/.config/menus/applications-merged/ and 
~/.config/menus/kde-applications-merged/ directories and the path in it 
should be fixed - "username" changed to the actual user name. After 
copying the files from ~/.kde/share/applnk/Wine to ~/.wine/menu the 
items should be visible in the menu (I think it's a good idea to keep 
the .desktop files in ~/.wine). If anyone would test it I would be glad 
to know how it works.
  There is a small problem that KDE scans the ~/.kde/applnk directory 
(unlike Gnome that scans only the global directories /usr/share/applnk 
and /etc/X11/applnk and that why the menu is not visible) and after this 
change will display the menu items twice. This can be fixed by creating 
the ".desktop" in legacy directories with "OnlyShowIn=Old;".
  If this sound good I can send patches to winecreateprefix and 
wineshelllink with these fixes.

Mikolaj Zalewski