[Portland] xdg-open and default application launching

[Kevin Krammer]

Hi Aaron,

On Saturday 03 February 2007 19:43, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> 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. =)

Nice :)

> 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.

For terminal there is xdg-terminal in the CVS, but since it is not covered by 
the test suite yet, it is not in the release.

IMHO xdg-open directory for default file manager makes sense, what other 
application would be the _default_ handler for directories?
 
> 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) ...

This is on our roadmap, target date April IIRC (I think Waldo has a list of 
the milestones we agreed upon at DAM3)

> 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?

Just keep in mind that we want xdg-utils to be viable on already released 
desktops as well.
If on future desktops work can be delegated to a desktop independet tool which 
happens to access the same database the desktop themselves use, all the 
better.

> 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.

Great!
Maybe, if time permits, you (meaning those GNOME developers and yourself) 
could have a quick look at two other options the ISVs at DAM3 were interested 
in:

1) installing launcher buttons on the panel, i.e. as an alternative to icons 
on the desktop (not necessarly the main panel, whatever the desktop uses for 
launchers)

2) filetype (MIME type) based actions in the filemanager context menus. 
Specific use case: offering a "Print" option on PDF files that call Adobe 
Reader with a specific commandline option

Cheers,
Kevin

P.S.: if any of those GNOME developers feel interested in this kind of 
functionality but do not want to subscribe to yet another mailinglist 
(although this is one is quite low traffic) pass them my offer to send mails 
to me directly

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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