Comment 8 for bug 488790

I think that you proposal is ok, except that <application_name> should be the base filename of the .desktop file for the app. The reason is that apps need to be able to find the corresponding .desktop file easily - to show icons, internationalized names, etc.

With your proposal one needs to sift through all .desktop files and find the one with the right Exec field. That seems inefficient and inconvenient. Another benefit of the my proposal is that alleviates the distro-quirks problem to some degree (not fully though). The Exec field can readily be looked up from the .desktop file.

To be concise: I propose that /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop has id "app://firefox.desktop" , or in Bash-terms "app://$(basename $full_path)". This also coincides with GLib definition of "application ids" (except the app:// prefix): see http://library.gnome.org/devel/gio/stable/gio-Desktop-file-based-GAppInfo.html#g-desktop-app-info-new