Menu Entry for Octave

[RayArnold]

Binary package hint: octave2.9

The computer science department of West Virginia University offers Octave as an alternative to Matlab for its students. Although Octave provides the necessary functionality for the undergraduate classes, it is not easily discoverable for students unfamiliar with Octave and/or Linux. I think that it would be helpful to have Octave install a menu entry so that casual Linux users could easily find it. The systems office here at WVU's CSEE department has actually created a package that installs Octave and provides a menu option for it. I would like to propose that it, or something to the same effect, be added to the Octave package.

[Ming Hua (minghua)]

My understanding is that octave is still a command-line program. It's going to be hard to make a desktop menu entry for a command-line program that satisfy most users.

[RayArnold (ray-arnold)]

I'm arguing that octave should be in the menu because it has a graphical component. Additionally, I'm questioning why is it hard to make an entry for it? Observe in our lcsee-octave package, we pretty easily created a menu entry.

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Octave
GenericName=Octave
Comment=GNU Octave language for numerical computations
Type=Application
Exec=gnome-terminal -e octave
Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/octave.xpm
Categories=Application;Development;

And the icon we are using is attached, although the icon on http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ would work as well.

These files install to:
octave.desktop usr/share/applications/
octave.xpm usr/share/pixmaps/

[LaserJock (laserjock)]

I believe the recommended way to do that is:

Terminal=True

http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/ar01s05.html

It's also recommended to not put a full path for Icon, rather it can be as easy as:

Icon=octave

As the full path and file extension are automatically found. And while I'm being picky, I believe Application category is no longer needed in Gnome.

[Siegfried Gevatter (rainct)]

So should this be fixed or is the bug invalid?

[Ming Hua (minghua)]

I am not a fan of the idea of adding desktop entries for every program, but I think this bug is valid, especially with the "Terminal=True" option available. Noboday has provided a good patch yet, though.

[alex (jindalee-mail)]

I also think that it would be very helpful for new user to add an entry in Application/Programming. By the way, this is the case in Fedora.

[Barry deFreese (bddebian)]

I'm working on this. However, I assume as Jordan stated that Terminal=True is the preferred way to go over Exec=gnome-terminal.. as I am assuming this would run under KDE and/or xfce as well? Thanks.

[LaserJock (laserjock)]

Well, I believe that is the way the XDG spec says to do it. It would indeed make it independent of desktop environment. I think it also allows for some other things. Thanks for working on this Barry.

[Barry deFreese (bddebian)]

Uploaded.

[Barry deFreese (bddebian)]

Built on all archs.