Have a way to dynamically change software associations at distribution level

[Jannis Pohlmann]

On Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:24:04 +0200
Didier Roche <didrocks at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 11:15 AM, Alexander Larsson<alexl at redhat.com>
> wrote:
> > Where does this leave us? One possible solution would be to tag each
> > application with a set of desktops that is was "designed" for
> > (DesignedFor=KDE). I.e. it would be KDE in core KDE apps, unset in
> > "normal" apps and possibly have both KDE and GNOME in some special
> > distro things that want to override desktop specific core apps in
> > both distros.
> 
> So, taking Ubuntu as an example where FF is the default for Ubuntu and
> Kubuntu (IIRC, not really sure for Kubuntu). We will patch the FF
> .desktop file to add DesignedFor=GNOME;KDE; entry?

The way I understood is you leave out DesignedFor for DE-independent
apps like firefox. The question is how this works when another neutral
web browser is installed. Via InitialPreference in the "*all* desktop
files" fallback?

> > Default lookup would be done in two steps, first it would look up
> > only in the apps with designed-for=$XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP. If this
> > fails we'd do a second lookup in *all* desktop files. In each
> > lookup the InitialPreference is used as a tie-breaker, so the
> > priorities for e.g. core KDE apps are not affected by other
> > desktops, but they also work for lookups from e.g. Gnome if there
> > are no core gnome apps for that specific mimetype.
> >
> > Implementation wise this could be done pretty simply by storing for
> > each mimetype implemented by a desktop file both the mimetype as-is,
> > plus a copy of it prefixed with each of the DesignedFor keys. So,
> > we'd do lookups for defaults first by looking for e.g.
> > "KDE-text/plain" and then "text/plain".
> >
> > Opinions?
> >
> 
> I think you fixed our previous concern about "look at each deskop
> environment specific application first" with the "DesignedFor" entry.
> However, we have to define it preciselyl to not mix up this entry with
> the Category one.
> 
> I reckon that we still needs to standardize some kind of priority
> concept, even if the need for coordination is withdrawn with your
> proposal: for instance, telling than no .desktop file must have a prio
> number > 50. That will enable distros to be sure they can patch an
> .desktop file to have it by default, whenever applications is
> installed in the distros. With that, they don't have to look at all
> application prio associated with a particular MIMEType to ensure that
> one will not override their wish.

Maybe define ranges for different purposes. Dunno how many different
priorities you really need, but e.g. if we used 50, we could say that
in the InitialPreference

   0-30 is for upstream
  30-50 is reserved for third party modifications (e.g. distributions)

That would make sure distributions really have control. Otherwise, if
you allowed upstream to go up to 50, you can never be sure whether or
not your highest priority app will not be overriden by another app
coming with the DE.

  - Jannis
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