[Portland] Default application handling

[Kevin Krammer]

Sorry for the length of this posting, it is more or less a brain dump of this 
issue :)

------ Default application handling -------

There are basically three operations associated with the idea of default 
applications:

1) querying which application is the default for a certain use case
2) changing this default, globally and for a single user
3) launching the default application

------ Currently available handling -------

Currently this operations are covered partially by xdg-mime, xdg-open, 
xdg-email and xdg-terminal.

xdg-mime can query and set default handlers for MIME types, xdg-open can 
launch the default handler based on a given URI or file, xdg-email has some 
special additions (can created a mailto URI from separate parameters, has 
workaround for encoding issue in KDE code path).

------ Requested additions -------

During the OSDL Desktop Architect Meeting 3 in Portland in December 2006, the 
ISVs really liked the solution so far, but had some additional requirements.

Basically this requirements boil down to having default handlers for things 
that to not have an associated MIME type, such as terminal, protocol handlers 
other then email (e.g. OpenWengo seeks a way to install itself as the handler 
for its own URI scheme)

Waldo had the idea of using some kind of special MIME type category, e.g. 
protocol/something, special application like terminal could maybe mapped as 
application/x-terminal.

Technically this shouldn't be a big problem, since the desktop environments 
already need to have infrastructure for this, the question is how difficult 
it will be to access through command line tools.

------ Naming of scripts -------

On the matter of naming:
I think the generic accessor like xdg-mime would be great (or in the case of 
mapping to special MIME types extending xdg-mime).

However, for launching, I prefer to have special launchers for those cases 
where the target is not necessarily a file/URI, e.g. a command for 
xdg-terminal, conceptual directories for file manager.

------ Filemanager handling -------

I imagine an xdg-utils script with the following capabilities:
- start filemanager for a given directory (basically what xdg-open does in 
this case)
- start filemanager for a conceptual directory, 
e.g. "Desktop", "Home", "Documents"
- install/uninstall extensions, i.e. actions for certain MIME types.

------ Summary -------

- we need a way to address applications currently without associated MIME type

- once we have this, we need either a new install/uninstall/query handler or 
extend xdg-mime

- add-on scripts for applications that do not fit the xdg-open usage pattern

Cheers,
Kevin

P.S.:

On the special sub topic of protocol handlers the main issue will be Mozilla's 
products since the generally do not cooperate with anyone (or maybe just on 
Windows) (e.g. security by obscurity measurement in mailto URIs to make 
Thunderbird incompatible with any other mailto handler)

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