Current desktop detection / app access - take 2.

[Thomas Leonard]

On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 06:23:45PM +0200, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> On Monday 17 of May 2004 18:01, Frederic Crozat wrote:
[...]
> > Keep in mind that /usr/libexec is not LSB compliant and is supposed to
> > be /usr/lib on LSB compliant systems..
> 
> IMHO it'd make more sense to use desktop-launcher-$desktop (located anywhere 
> in $PATH) instead of /usr/bin/desktop-launchers/$desktop (or whichever 
> location you'd want). That way it'd be possible to do e.g. user install 
> somewhere, with one specific location harcoded the functionality would be 
> lost. User install of whole KDE may seem strange, but in fact I did it once 
> (at school, in order to avoid using the CDE thing).

And for ROX, we normally *only* do user installs (the only part of the
install that requires writing to a non-user directory is adding ROX to the
list of sessions on the login screen, and that's optional).

[ about the original proposal ]

I was going to suggest the same thing as Havoc did elsewhere (ie, use the
MIME handler system), but I wasn't sure if any progress was being made on
that. It sounds like something useable may turn up soon, in which case
that's a much better solution.

Likewise, for the vfs stuff, you'd do much better to make a library with a
single desktop-agnostic interface and get that to call the underlying
GNOME or KDE vfs system, or just the normal kernel interfaces, as
appropriate. After all, that's the same code you'd have to implement in
every application under your proposal.

I dislike this desktop detection idea in general. We had a lot of problems
in the past with, eg, sawfish only supporting the extended window manager
hints if it detected it was running under GNOME, which meant that programs
that worked correctly under GNOME failed under ROX for no good reason.


-- 
Thomas Leonard			http://rox.sourceforge.net
tal00r at ecs.soton.ac.uk	tal197 at users.sourceforge.net
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