[Fedora-packaging] installing an icon to the desktop?

[Michael Thomas]

On 02/01/2011 03:14 PM, Bruce-Robert Pocock wrote:
> 2011/2/1 Isaac Fischer <xwaver at gmail.com>
>>
>> xdg-desktop-icon can't be done in %install, without putting your .desktop file in ~root/Desktop or whoever is building the package, because it's done at build time. xdg-desktop-icon only works for the current user. The regular user would have to have rights to the RPM database to install even a subpackage with nothing but the Launcher file and macros. So, upon reflection, that's why it can't be done at RPM install - you'd have to have a script which examines /home/* and inserts it into all of them, which is just flat out wrong.
> 
> 
> At least for the case of all locally-known users, you could envision
> reading the user database with getpwent(3), finding each home folder,
> plopping the .desktop file onto the ~/Desktop/ directory, and adding
> one to /etc/skel/Desktop/ for future users created locally. But that
> doesn't handle things like school or corporate LANs where /home/ (or
> the directory structure analogous to /home/…) may not be writeable by
> root.
> 
> Still not a great idea, but it would work in the most general case.

It seems that in order to really make such a mechanism work, you'd need
a system directory (/usr/share/Desktop? or something similar) that
contains additional icons that should be displayed on a user's desktop.
 Then when the user's session starts up, the session manager displays
all icons in ~/Desktop as well as the contents of /usr/share/Desktop.
This probably requires making changes to the session manager, however.

Having said this, I still think the idea of packages polluting the
users' desktops is gross.

--Wart