Cross-desktop helpers

[nf]

On Thu, 2004-12-09 at 22:00, Alex Graveley wrote: 
> Hi,
> 
> I really want a way to make my users happy.  XDG's charter is to provide
> the mechanism for this.  Yet I still have no desktop-neutral way of
> accomplishing the following:
> 
> 	* opening a file browser for a given local directory
> 	* opening a web browser
> 	* opening an email composer
> 
> How can we fix this?
> 
> -Alex
> 

Isn't that something that should be handled by a "Common-VFS" library?

http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gnome-vfs-2.0/gnome-vfs-20-gnome-vfs-mime-database.html#gnome-vfs-mime-get-all-applications See function: gnome_vfs_mime_get_default_application ()
And for KDE:
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/library/3.3-api/kio/html/classKRun.html

Where do desktops store "default_application" settings internally? Not
in a standardized place i suppose.

Are environment variables the right way to fix this? What if you change
the default web-browser? Do you have to log out and log in again that
all applications recognize the change?

Norbert