On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 9:27 AM, Grigorios Bouzakis <grbzks@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, May 08, 2008 at 03:53:29PM +0300, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:
On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 2:29 PM, Grigorios Bouzakis <grbzks@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi, i wanted to note that there is http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Desktop_Project maintained by bardo a TU, which mentions absolutely nothing about upstream. Instead it says "I (bardo) will write/modify the necessary files and notify the corresponding maintainers so they can be added to
On Thursday 08 May 2008 15:58:51 bardo wrote: the packages." Additionally there are links to the bug tracker. I have no idea if bardo submitts them upstream as well but i doubt it.
At the moment I don't. When I announced the project it got a good
reaction, so I carried on with it, but after a while creating and providing desktop files through the bug tracker I started receiving the "upstream problem" answer. This has become pretty frequent, so lately I haven't been doing very much on the Arch side. The few developers I tried to contact didn't do anything, so I suppose there's little to no interest from them.
The whole thing has started to become more frustrating than
anything, so at the moment I'm not working on it anymore.
IMHO, even though I'm aggresively against patching, I don't consider the .desktop files as patches. They are some extra, *non-code* files, that is fair for the distro to provide (like other configuration files). I don't really blame the app developers that don't include them upstream.
True, they are not patches, but they should be part of the applicqations source. Requering from packagers to write & include a .desktop file in their ditros for actively developed projects is IMO unecceptable today with linux being part of the desktop market. If they dont provide one its quite clear they dont want having one. If i submit a ,desktop file upstream and it gets rejected it should be treated the same as a rejected patch. Exception to the above rule would be projects not being actively developed anymore and only them.
Greg
We needn't get bogged down in another "is this the ARCH WAY?!?!" conversation here; I don't think it needs to be a policy decision. If neither Arch nor upstream want to deal with .desktop files (and they both seem to have their reasons), would it be possible to host some space somewhere that users could post their own? It wouldn't need to be Arch-hosted, perhaps this is a sf project waiting to happen; sort of a searchable repository for orphaned .desktop files? I'd be happy to go download .desktops from somewhere if they aren't already included.
-- Ryan W Sims
Anything that I package that could or should have a .desktop file is supplied in the "arch-binary-tarball" I create, even if it is not upstream. Why ?, well there is no reason NOT to have one in such circumstances, and often the upstream guys are expecting the downstream packagers to supply it. <- And that's o.k. with me. ** There can also be other reasons the upstream guys don't supply a .desktop file; but MOST importantly it is never a situation wherein the upstream guys do not want me to add one. NO ONE has ever said "please do NOT add that file to the binary". So I often do add such a file. And so it goes..... Very best regards; Bob Finch Liviu Librescu - În veci pomenirea lui. (May his memory be eternal.)