[desktop-discuss] Vermillion 40 notes

[Calum Benson]

On Wed, 2006-05-10 at 09:02 -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> Calum Benson wrote:
> > On Wed, 2006-05-10 at 07:34 -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> >> Calum Benson wrote:
> >>> We could then replace ggv by a little script that offered to update any 
> >>> ggv-invoking custom launchers or menu items in the user's environment, 
> >>> rather than just a symlink.  That would obviously then kick in the first 
> >>> time they tried to run one of those launchers or menu item after upgrading.
> >> Which would then make it impossible to have your home directory shared between
> >> ggv-bearing versions of GNOME (2.6 & earlier) and evince-bearing versions of
> >> GNOME  (Vermillion and later).
> > 
> > Only if you didn't give them the symlink option as one of the
> > alternatives during the migration process.
> 
> How would that work for a non-root user who uses multiple machines?

Should work just fine, because custom .desktop files are all defined in
the user's $HOME folder.  The sysadmin would have to decide what to do
with the global ones in /usr/share, depending on whether or not all
their servers offered users the same version of GNOME.

> Leaving a simple symlink in /usr/bin seems harmless and much less
> work than the alternatives.

I guess so, we'll see... just concerns me a bit that application
swapsies are guaranteed to happen again in the future, and it would be
nice to have a consistent way of dealing with them.  ("Much less work"
shouldn't really come into it; it's putting in the extra work to get
these sorts of things right that makes the likes of OSX what they are
today.)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.benson at sun.com            Java Desktop System Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems