DESKTOP_LAUNCH spec. (rehash)
Michael Meeks
michael at ximian.com
Tue Aug 17 13:31:28 EEST 2004
Hi guys,
So - this is the DESKTOP_LAUNCH spec. it's an incredibly simple thing,
but then - it's very useful. I'd love to get this onto the fd.o
standards list, no idea how to upload stuff there.
In addition; to make vendors' lives that much easier, and since (at
least) Gnome is in a frozen state, I also attach the patches that make
this fly for us. The implementation of the 'desktop-launch' shell script
is left to the distribution vendor; ours starts:
#! /bin/bash
# Try DESKTOP_LAUNCH
if [ -n "$DESKTOP_LAUNCH" ] ; then
if [ -x "$DESKTOP_LAUNCH" ] ; then
exec "$DESKTOP_LAUNCH" ${1+"$@"}
fi
LAUNCH="`which \"$DESKTOP_LAUNCH\" 2> /dev/null`"
if [ -x "$LAUNCH" ] ; then
exec "$LAUNCH" ${1+"$@"}
fi
fi
Before going on to other more wild & woolly ways of trying to do the
same thing :-)
The attached patches are Jan's work - there was also a small fix to
KMail to support "attachment" I think. Currently I believe evolution /
KMail supports 'attach' and not 'attachment', so I guess we should fix
that to be in-line with Mozilla.
HTH,
Michael.
--
michael at ximian.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
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* Launching desktop URI handlers
2004/08/17 - Michael Meeks & Jan Holesovsky
** Abstract
It is often useful for an application to allow the launching
of a helper application on the same screen to display a URI. This
method provides a simple mechansim for achieving this in a
cross-desktop compatible fashion.
** Requirements
+ The desktop session environment will include a
DESKTOP_LAUNCH environment variable.
+ The session path shall include a program named
'desktop-launch' that initially attempts to
execute the contents of $DESKTOP_LAUNCH
passing on to it any provided arguments.
** In more detail
The DESKTOP_LAUNCH environment variable should point to an
executable with as little system-specific qualification as possible.
ie. 'kde-open' is preferable to /opt/kde3/bin/kde-open since it is
more likely to transfer to a more diverse range of (possibly remote)
systems.
The desktop-launch program can adopt other strategies for
detecting the current desktop, and appropriate handler to execute -
however it must initially attempt to execute the $DESKTOP_LAUNCH
variable. The desktop-launch must return a status code to indicate if
the launch succeded; in the normal fashion.
** Special URIs
Most URIs are uncontroversial, the mailto: URI (cf. RFC 2368),
has a couple of extra quirks. For maximum compatibility, the
traditional form for simple recipients should be preferred;
ie. mailto:dave at cridland.net
rather than mailto:?to=dave at cridland.net
In addition, attachments should be denoted by (multiple)
'attachment' attributes, each containing a URI string.
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