Added by Thilo Pfennig, last edited by Jesse Zhang on Mar 23, 2010  (view change) show comment

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This page discusses what is needed for a good desktop application package.

Desktop Menu entries

To get a menu entry for a package it needs a Menu File (.desktop). You should consider bugging the upstream authors if there is none. But you can also write your own.

  • Read this: Desktop Entry Specification and Registered Categories
  • Its important to have at least a general category like this: Categories=Games;BlocksGame
  • You can copy examples of similar applications from /usr/share/applications and customize it for your needs.
  • If you make a desktop file of your own try to give this to the original authors so they can incllude it in their next version and let them update it

Paths

Make sure the application puts its executable in paths where they can be found. Same is true for other kind of files. If things are wrong you should consider contacting the original authors to give them feedback or here why they decided to use something non-standard. Generally a desktop file executable should go into /usr/bin (or %(bindir)s in Conary recipe). Conary has some macro names you should use in your recipes instead of writing the resolved path: http://wiki.rpath.com/wiki/Conary:Directory_Path_Macros

disable scrollkeeper

You need to pass --disable-scrollkeeper, as an ./configure option, to a GNOME recipe (unless it doesn't accept such an option), so that it does not try to update the scrollkeeper database.