Dear man-db maintainers,

it often happens that a GUI program has no manpage, and a system administrator may want to know quickly what the program is about.

GUI programs that follow the FreeDesktop.org menu entry specification often provide a one-line summary of what they do in their menu entry, in as many languages as they could recruit translators.

Following a discussion on the development mailing list of the Debian project, I would like to propose you the following feature request: can the whatis/apropos system pull the one-line description of a program's FD.o menu entry file when no manpage is available?

Here is a link to the FD.o desktop entry specification, followed by an example entry:

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

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=Foo Viewer
Comment=The best viewer for Foo objects available!
TryExec=fooview
Exec=fooview %F
Icon=fooview
MimeType=image/x-foo;
X-KDE-Library=libfooview
X-KDE-FactoryName=fooviewfactory
X-KDE-ServiceType=FooService

Cheers,

--
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan