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?)
Thanks!
--
Vita Humpa
Fedora QA
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