Gnome Icons, Gnome/KDE Menus need improvement

[Ville Skyttä]

On Tue, 2004-06-15 at 23:41, Bryan Clark wrote:
> I've updated the GNOME HIG, adding a section reflecting the situation
> wrt the Name + GenericName menu item name creation.  

Thanks, that clarifies things.

> The problem with a cat of Name + GenericName is that it doesn't always
> work for languages other than English.

I think it could have been slightly more flexible than just a blunt
"cat", but that's a minor detail.  Probably the solution below works
just fine, maybe even better than language specific rules for
constructing the labels.

>   To reflect this problem the HIG
> now requires that the Name field use the "[Proper Name] + [Generic
> Name]" format where the Generic Name is purely derived from the
> applications functionality (like "Web Browser") and the proper name is
> one it's project name (like "Mozilla").  Thus the .desktop entry for the
> GenericName field is the applications functionality without the proper
> name.

Ok.  Now what would be nice to have is:

- An updated version of the desktop entry spec that reflects this, so
that the .desktop files will start to come "correctly" already from
upstream, and/or upstream will accept patches.  I saw you already pinged
xdg-list about updating the spec.

- A list of approved/recommended GenericName values in order to make the
"grouping" (ie. showing only the generic name when no other entries with
that generic name are present) functionality outlined in [1] to work
reliably.

[1] http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/draft_hig_new/desktop-integration.html#menu-item-names
    (see below example 2.7, X-Chat .desktop file)