Current desktop detection / app access ...

[Michael Meeks]

Hi guys,

	Just wondering if it would be possible to standardise on a desktop
detection method, that would work well for all relevant desktops; there
are two places in the OO.o code where this causes us pain:
	* toolkit integration
		+ extensive random X property pokeage,
		  WM name sniffage etc. unreliable & fragile
	* helper application spawning
		+ no detection, each distro patches this one way
		  or the other, for mailto: / http: / whatever - and the
		  defaults are hard-coded.

	So - possibly this is standardised already; otherwise a proposal
something like this might work:

	* DESKTOP environment variable:

	This is a ':' delimited symbolic path of desktop technologies, this
complexity is to allow for the myriad desktops out there built on top of
various different bits; eg.

	DESKTOP=kde:qt, DESKTOP=rox:gtk or DESKTOP=gnome:gnome-vfs:gtk

	This environment variable can be parsed by eg. OO.o to work out which
toolkit to integrate with in a sane way.

	In addition - we could have a: 'desktop-open' type shell-script; that
does something like:

	if !DESKTOP
		DESKTOP=<vendor specific default desktop>
	foreach element in DESKTOP
		if -f /usr/bin/desktop/$element-open
			if !/usr/bin/desktop/$element-open; then exit 0;
	exit 1;

	So - then each desktop as it wishes can install it's own shell script
to launch whatever it wants for various URIs [ Gnome has an existing
'gnome-open' script of this type already ], and they can fallback onto
each other.

	Of course - there is probably a much better / simpler way of doing all
of this that I'm just missing; advice much appreciated.

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael at ximian.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot