From owner-freebsd-hackers  Wed Apr 28 21:45: 0 1999
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From: Anthony Kimball <alk@pobox.com>
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Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 23:44:48 -0500 (CDT)
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To: hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Adding desktop support
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On Wed, Apr 28, 1999 at 03:44:47PM -0700, Sean Eric Fagan wrote:
> Putting icons in the executable itself is pretty stupid -- it's a single
> instance of something that a window manager can use, and there are much
> less-invasive ways of doing the same thing.

One problem with the traditional hier(7) approach is that the data
for a single application is scattered across the filesystem.  One-file
simplicity is a worthwhile cause for deviation from this tradition.

I agree that putting *only* icons in the executable would be silly,
when one could solve a much bigger problem with relatively little
incremental effort.  I don't see it as invasive, however.

I strongly favor a generalization which adds not a .icon section but
a more general .desk section, and adopts an extensible, well-defined
structure for this section.

I suggest 

.desk is 
  ( 
    unsigned annotation_type +
    unsigned annotation_databytes +
    uchar_t annotation_data[annotation_databytes] +
    uchar_t pad[4*((annotation_databytes+3)/4)-annotation_databytes]
  ) *

and a well-known system file defining known annotation_type values.
I think XML is over-engineering.



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