Missing menu items after upgrade

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 20:26:44 -0600, Michal Jaegermann
<michal at harddata.com> wrote:
> Or an application is something which has a corresponding .desktop
> file?  Then Colin may simply remove the later. :-)

the .desktop files are becoming more important with the recent change to include
mime file association in the .desktop file for gnome applications to
use.  This greatly magnifies the importance of provided a .desktop
file for each application AND it greatly complicates whether these
files should be handled in the packaging as config files or not.  Do
we want to obliterate local changes to Mime information with an
application update? I could argue either way on the question.

So if you want to be able to open up a file in nautilus into an
application..like emacs... you need to have the .desktop file present
on system to provide gnome with that mime information. Lets beat a
dead horse for a second....
/usr/share/applications/gnu-emacs.desktop
MimeType=text/english;text/plain;text/x-makefile;text/x-c++hdr;text/x-c++src;text/x-chdr;text/x-csrc;text/x-java;text/x-moc;text/x-pascal;text/x-tcl;text/x-tex;application/x-shellscript;text/x-c;text/x-c++;

Isn't that a very interesting default list of associations, for an
application that an end-user can't find anywhere in the gnome menus?
Now i find it extremely amusing, that I can open up nautilus and I can
browse to a .cpp file and I can right click on the file and see emacs
in the applications to use for that file, but i cant open emacs from a
menu. Hell I can even make emacs the default application to use for
ALL .cpp files...but i can't open a blank emacs from a menu.
This absolutely, positively seems wrong to me. Why should I, an
end-user be able to choose to open up a file with default mime
associations in emacs from nautilus and not be able to open emacs to
create NEW files?  xdvi...i can understand..its strictly a viewer..its
not an editor. If i run across a dvi file i want to view in
nautilus..fire up an xdvi window and view it, no need for a menu
entry....that makes some sense. But emacs...emacs is perfectly
functional opened up to a blank buffer...and users... end-users are
being exposed to emacs out of context in the nautilus "open with"
menu. If it were really going to be delibrately hidden from
end-users...strike the .desktop file completely and remove the mime
associations other gnome applications are going to use to present
end-users with emacs as a viewer option.

Let the Emacs weenies...suffer the commandline to use the application
the so highly value as to demand it be part of a desktop install, and
yet hidden from desktop users.

-jef