Bug 103216

Created attachment 134789 [details] [review]
desktop-entry-spec: New section "File naming"

This combines the notes on file naming that were previously part of
"Basic format of the file" with the former appendix "Desktop File ID".

Created attachment 134790 [details] [review]
desktop-entry-spec: Formalize file naming recommendations

* Add a link to the canonical definition of a D-Bus well-known name
* Specify punctuation in terms of Unicode code points                 
* Split syntactic rules (character set) and semantic rules
  (relationship to domain names) into separate paragraphs

Created attachment 134791 [details] [review]
desktop-entry-spec: Formalize the reverse DNS convention

Also mention the D-Bus convention for the part after the domain name,
which is widely deployed and seems as good as anything else.

Created attachment 134792 [details] [review]
desktop-entry-spec: Deprecate dashes in well-known names

We don't really need two parallel forms of punctuation, and in       
particular DNS domain names only have one (dashes). If we choose one  
representation and deprecate the other, it makes the recommendation
clearer for app authors.                                 
   
Dashes are not allowed in D-Bus object paths and interface names,              
are only conditionally allowed in Flatpak app IDs (they can only
appear in the last element), and have a special syntactic role in
Freedesktop icon names.                                                           
                             
An alternative approach would be to allow dashes, deprecate                       
underscores, have a trivial conversion from DNS domain name to
desktop file ID (except in the case of leading digits), and always
special-case the transformation from desktop file ID/well-known bus
name to object path, interface name or Flatpak app ID. However, that
seems more error-prone, because it would make naive code incorrect; 
and general-purpose conversion from DNS domain name to desktop file     
ID is always going to need a special case anyway, to deal with
leading digits (allowed in DNS but not D-Bus).

I've raised this on various relevant mailing lists:

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2017-October/013959.html
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/appstream/2017-October/000193.html
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dbus/2017-October/017334.html
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/flatpak/2017-October/000811.html

This looks good to me.

Yes, looks good to me too.

Do you have git access, or should I apply and push the commits?

(In reply to David Faure from comment #7)
> Do you have git access, or should I apply and push the commits?

I am not a member of the 'standards' group on fdo; if you are, please apply and push.

(In reply to Simon McVittie from comment #0)
> Whichever one is chosen, I'll update the D-Bus Specification to recommend
> that one and deprecate (un-recommend?) the other.

Bug #103914.

(In reply to Simon McVittie from comment #8)
> (In reply to David Faure from comment #7)
> > Do you have git access, or should I apply and push the commits?
> 
> I am not a member of the 'standards' group on fdo; if you are, please apply
> and push.

Is there someone who can land this, and preferably refresh the web-accessible Desktop Entry specification document to pick up the change? Thanks!

Pushed, see https://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/desktop-entry-spec-latest.html#file-naming