Adding "Actions" to desktop-entry files

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Saturday 20 October 2007, Ernst Persson wrote:
> That looks like a different thing though.
> I guess that would be used for: if you right click on a file with a
> mime type that's supported by the .desktop file you can choose between
> those actions?

correct; this is something slightly different than what you are looking for. 
these are the "servicemenu" actions in kde with an analog in gnome being 
those custom nautilus context menu actions.

> What I'm proposing is more: what programs should be available for
> setting as default for different actions. So we can make programs like
> gnome-default-applications-properties smarter.
> Having good terminology is one part of the problem...

yes, i see how this is about default apps.

i don't think putting these actions in the .application desktop files 
themselves will work out very well since you may have multiple apps in the 
same category and the user (or packager, or sysadmin) will want to pick 
amongst them. we already have Categories in the .desktop files that we can 
use to identify candidates for the various categories... so i don't think 
that this approach would add actually useful information to the system.

(if we can't identify, for instance, all media players capable of being set as 
the default player, perhaps we need some more Categories.)

at a conference last year, i suggested using fake mimetypes to register what 
default apps were selected in a similar fashion to what you suggest on the 
wiki. my thinking was:

- it makes it easy to extend versus having settings in a config file 
somewhere, but that means another shared set of data files somewhere to 
process, ...

- ... but if we use mimetype files: both kde and gnome have an implementation 
of these, so it would be instantly sharable without lots more code to 
accomodate another shared configuration resource

- it maps fairly decently to the concepts imho, esp when files are involved 
though obviously they wouldn't always.

i suggested an X-DefaultApplication/* group of mimetypes, with the usual 
default set provided: WebBrowser, Terminal, Email, FileManager, etc... 

such a shared system would make at least some packagers happy, too, since 
right now a lot of them have to have fairly involved systems in place to make 
the same default browser appear in all their supported desktop. in fact, it 
was fedora packagers who brought this issue up to us.

unfortunately the idea didn't go anywhere as only the kde developers and the 
affected rpm packagers in attendance figured that sharing this stuff was 
worthwhile. *shrug*

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech
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