I made a bug over the weekend to remind myself to fix the HIG on this. 

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=144284

The F.D.O spec seems to suggest that Name is purely the proper name of the application without the description of functionality included.  We should align on this issue.  My recommendation is to format the Name as "[Proper Name] [Description of Functionality]" and GenericName as "[Description of Functionality]".  When two applications exist with the same "[Description of Functionality]" then the Name is used instead.

I can see the possibility of expecting the "[Proper Name] [Description of Functionality]" format to be generated automatically via the way the F.D.O. spec is now, however the code isn't there to support this and I suspect issues (especially in regards to translation) will arise if we try to generate the names automatically.

~ Bryan

On Mon, 2004-06-14 at 10:01 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
We do need to fix this HIG vs. desktop entry spec issue. Historically
what we've done for Red Hat is just put what we want in Name and ignore
GenericName.

Havoc

Email message/mailbox attachment, "Forwarded message - Re: Gnome Icons, Gnome/KDE Menus need improvement"
On Mon, 2004-06-14 at 10:01 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
What are your thoughts on this
(response to bugzilla re: changing menu entries)

Kaffeine Maintainer (Livna.org):

------- Additional Comment #1 From Ville Skyttä 2004-06-13 21:12 --

> I am not quite comfortable changing the menu entry because it is implementation
specific how the actual shown label is constructed.  Moreover, we use
freedesktop.org .desktop files to provide the menu entries, and so the 
canonical
specification to follow is the desktop entry specification, which says 
Name is
the app_name, and I'd say GenericName would correspond to app_function.
http://freedesktop.org/Standards/desktop-entry-spec/0.9.4/ar01s04.html

Until the ambiguities (and AFAICS even small conflicts) between the 
GNOME HIG
and desktop entry specifications are clarified, and there is a clear 
documented
way how to represent this information in .desktop files in Fedora stuff, 
I do
not want to go into the business of changing things.  What would make 
sense to
me would be to construct the menu entry label like "Name GenericName" 
from the
.desktop entry fields.  That would result in a mess if Name already 
contained
app_function.

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