Proposal: Too similar application names

[Rex Dieter]

On 06/02/2011 08:54 AM, Vitezslav Humpa wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> At last Fedora QA meeting John Dulaney had a proposal concerning the issue of similar application names we use around Fedora desktops.
>
> For example: surely sometimes you had both GNOME and XFCE installed and went for menus to open - say a terminal. The environment would use the same icon and a same name for both gnome-terminal and xfce-terminal, which resulted in you opening the other app than desired, perhaps (thanks to Murphy's laws :) ) more often than the desired one. More examples of this are "Software updates"/"Software update"(just within GNOME), "System Monitor" for both gnome-system-monitor and ksysguard, some "system-config-*" utilities vs. GNOME control panel applets and more.
>
> This is a call for having a discussion on trying to establish some compromise - on what to put as a name in the desktop[1] file for corresponding applications around different Fedora desktops as well as among applications inside each of those. The goal is simply to avoid people being unable to recognize specific applications around the desktop menus etc., which we could reach simply by rethinking the "name" fields in the *.desktop files of such applications.
>
> The way KDE application launcher handles this also provides nice example for a design solution to this problem. They use a "Generic" (e.g. Terminal) field to describe the application primarily and have the name of the actual binary (e.g. Konsole) present in small letters when the generic name is not unique. For gnome-shell, in it's current in-high-development state, proposing a design like this may also be good idea. Other than that - at least handling this by making a renaming compromise among the desktop environments would be very nice.
>
> We were thinking on expanding the release criteria to have one to deal with this issue, but for sure we need to discuss this first.
>
> Thus - thoughts? :) (Might be a good idea in having the conversation joined in one list we are all subscribed - perhaps test or desktop?)

The desktop-entry-spec does specify Name= and GenericName= to help 
distinguish matters,
http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/desktop-entry-spec-1.0.html#recognized-keys

It's just that for various reasons, some desktops have chosen not to 
use/implement Name=  in menus.  I've tried to advocate supporting the 
spec for quite awhile...

-- Rex