[Portland] xdg-open generic_open() functionality

[Fernando]

*John Carlyle-Clarke* jpcc at bigfoot.com
<portland%40lists.freedesktop.org?Subject=%5BPortland%5D%20xdg-open%20generic_open%28%29%20functionality&In-Reply-To=>
*Tue Apr 22 17:38:49 PDT 2008*

> Dear all-
>
> I have some suggestions for improving this.  I found some problems when
> using gnome-do under Openbox, since gnome-do uses xdg-open for viewing
> items and in my environment the generic_open gets used.  I'd be willing
> to submit patches for review although I am a novice shell programmer.
> However because of my lack of experience I wanted to float the
> suggestions to see if they even hold water.
>
> (1) generic_open uses run-mailcap.  This is rather limited as it
> depends on file extensions.  It would seem better to use file or
> probably xdg-mime to choose how to open the file.
>
> The mime type could be fetched with:
>
> file --mime "$1"
>
> and extracted from the output and prepended to the filename before
> passing to run-mailcap.
>
> However, it looks to me like a better option would be to use xdg-mime,
> since xdg-mime query default "$1" will give you the default application
> to open the file.
>
> (2) The open_generic() function should support file URL's with encoded
> characters, e.g. file://home/user/foo%20bar
>
> gnome-open supports this format so it would make sense to try and match
> it since the above is a valid URL.  If not, the docs should be updated
> to specifically say that this may not be supported by xdg-open,
> depending on the environment.
>
> (3) Users of Fluxbox, Openbox and other WM's may have gnome-open or the
> corresponding KDE or XFCE components installed and may wish xdg-open to
> use them.
>
> detectDE() could have code added to check for a variable - say
> XDG_OPEN_FORCE_DE - and use that value (kde, gnome, xfce, generic)
> instead of attempting a detection if it is present.


Any news on this?
It is really annoying that there's no good implementation of any
generic way of managing mimetype associations. xdg-open is not really
an option when you are not using gnome/kde.


--
Ferk
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