2011/6/2 Vitezslav Humpa <vhumpa(a)redhat.com>
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!
maybe if, when positioning mouse cursor over the icon, a popup (or bubble or
whatever it's name) containig the real name (gnome-terminal, ksysguard, etc)
will show up, all confusion will be gone.