Thanks to Nat, I have this picture of Joe Shaw on my phone, and I recommend you get one for yourself too

For GNOME Foundation Board of Directors

I’ve gotten some really good feedback from people, mostly in email about the menu stuff that I’ve posted. So here’s a little summary and some clarifications, because I think I wasn’t completely clear before and some of the responses have been way off what I’m looking to do.

The freedesktop.org desktop-entry-spec specifies that the .desktop files have the following format, using the Yelp project as an example:

Name=Yelp
GenericName=Help

With this specification you cannot produce an internationalized form of the of the menu entry, Yelp Help, or generically [Project Name] [Functional Name] – lets call this the PF format. In English the PF format obviously works, but we can’t be so pretentious as to assume that it works like that in all other languages, in fact it doesn’t. So even if we wanted to use the PF format we couldn’t conform to the f.d.o spec and have the translations make sense.

Currently, applications that want to use the PF format have to apply it to the name field, which goes against the f.d.o desktop entry spec recommendations. We’d like to keep our desktop entry files standardize to this spec as I’ve heard that Unix is a multi-user system.

What I’d like to see defined is how GNOME displays these desktop entries, not changing the desktop entries against the spec, changing the display so that our view of applications in core GNOME is more integrated and less like a bunch of 3rd party apps thrown together. There is room for the possibility of displaying things like this, but I think we need to work on this definition so that all the current desktop entry files conform to the standard and we have an elegant way of displaying them.

Shaun makes a good point that this might have odd effects on help pages.

Just to throw an idea out, maybe the doc system can be changed to use displayed name of the application instead of having it hard coded in the docs. If the doc system were grabbing the name of the application from the .desktop file (in the compile or install or during use) then it would always have the proper name and this might unload a lot of the doc teams time constantly having to chase the latest whim of how to rename everything on the desktop.

The idea has some holes, we might need to add something to the .desktop file so the docs know which name to grab and use, plus I’m sure there are a few other things that need work.

Anyway, I hope this clears up some of the issues, maybe not. I guess people can keep emailing me about it or catch me on IRC.