[Portland] xdg-open and default application launching

[Kevin Krammer]

On Saturday 03 February 2007 22:14, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On February 3, 2007, Kevin Krammer wrote:
> > 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.
>
> i just looked at it and it's exactly what is needed. great work! =)

Thanks :)

> > IMHO xdg-open directory for default file manager makes sense, what other
> > application would be the _default_ handler for directories?
>
> yes, that makes sense. the desired feature add is to open the default file
> manager with no parameters, so it will open to whatever the default URL is

Ah, true, good use case.

> for that app. this seems to be covered by this:
> > > 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)
>
> cool. i've let the fedora packagers know this and they are excited =))

Excellent :)

> i think we can expect this to be in the next release of fedora. if not 7,
> then certainly 8 but perhaps even 7 particularly if we can get the
> xdg-defaultapp (or whatever) script available in cvs in time.

Unfortunately I am currently tied up with Qt3 D-Bus and the respective KDE 
implementation for DAPI. 

> i think having it in fedora will be a Big Thing(tm) for the obvious reasons
> (usage, testing, lsb, etc)

It is also packaged by Debian, though I think nothing depends on it yet, but 
they have some patches to make the generic execution branches fall back to 
their helper scripts.

> > 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.
>
> apparently there is exactly zero interest from the relevant GNOME
> developers. one of the fedora "managers", who is a GNOME user himself,
> talked to them about and the reception was not positive. =/
>
> they basically took the opinion that the gnome/kde situation is like
> macos/windows: separate platforms so this doesn't matter. personally i
> think that's not a helpful POV, particularly for ISVs and those managing
> deployments with mixed desktops (e.g. google), but .... not much i can do
> about it. oh well, xdg-utils to the rescue! =)

I think it might depend who one approaches. Elijah Newren and Dave Neary, who 
both attended DAM3, were very positive about it.

And, for example for xdg-terminal, I received both the GNOME code path and the 
XFCE code path from people on this mailinglist.

On the KDE side it would be great to have someone looking into support for 
KDE4, e.g. how can the scripts detect KDE4 and not end up in the KDE3 code 
path.

Cheers,
Kevin

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