Current desktop detection / app access - take 2.

[Mike Hearn]

On Mon, 17 May 2004 23:15:15 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> What are the uses for DESKTOP other than the MIME handler stuff?

As Michael already said, it's useful for things like selecting whether to
track Qt or GTK+ theming. There isn't really a good way to select this
automatically currently and probably never will be. You could target one
and not the other, but that's the kind of arbitrary decision large
independent projects like OpenOffice shy away from.

I don't think anybody is suggesting this as a permanent solution. As a
hack until we *do* have a largely standardised platform  (unlike today)
though it makes sense.

> I think we have pretty solid technically sound approaches in mind for
> the major interoperability areas, and it really is not that hard to do
> the work correctly if more people start working on it. In particular the
> MIME stuff should be easy to complete in the near future, and that seems
> to be the focus of this proposal.

Not just MIME but VFS urls, theming, even button ordering can all be
affected. Some of these things are easily standardisable and some are not.
 
thanks -mike