[Portland] xdg-open and default application launching

[Aaron J. Seigo]

hi...

i'm at the red hat fedora conference and we're discussing greater usage of 
xdg-*. in fact, it stands a really good chance right now of finding its way 
into the core installation and being used by things like packages during 
installation and panel icons. =)

speaking of panel icons, one of the use cases that came up was opening default 
applications. right now neither xdg-open and xdg-mime, to my knowledge 
anyways, can be directed to open the default terminal app, for instance. 
there is xdg-mail which does this for email, and one can feed about:/ or 
$HOME to xdg-open to force the desired results more or less for web and file 
management respectively, but that's not overly pretty.

what does everyone think about providing a way to ask xdg-mime, or even 
another script?, to open the default app for a given use (terminal, web, file 
management, etc) ...

something i considered was to have a new branch in the mimetype database 
called x-default/ (or something similar) so we could have x-default/terminal, 
x-default/webbrowser, etc... `xdg-mime default x-default/terminal konsole` 
would then allow xdg-open to open the file by looking into the mime database?

i'll be speaking with a gnome developer shortly (one of the fedora managers 
are off looking for the right developer at the moment) about this as well, 
but i figured it would be a good idea to get input from the xdg-* people as 
well.

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

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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