Current desktop detection / app access - take 2.

[Waldo Bastian]

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On Tue May 18 2004 05:15, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Hmm, I ended up writing a bit of a rant here, please just take it as my
> initial opinion.
>
> We should get Jonathan Blandford to comment on this, he's offline for a
> few days though. He's been paying attention to the
> MIME/preferred-applications stuff, which I'm guessing conflicts with the
> desktop-launch concept. (If I change my preferred application or MIME
> setting for PDF files to foobar, then do I get foobar or the PDF viewer
> that's part of the desktop, for example. And if there's a standard
> preferred applications system, shouldn't it just allow per-desktop
> settings, instead of having this separate desktop-launch thing?)
>
> I guess I'll be blunt and say this DESKTOP thing seems like a pretty
> huge hack, I'd rather see us just standardize the MIME and
> preferred-apps systems, with per-desktop configuration included in those
> specs if required.

Maybe we should start with the specification of a "desktop-launch" tool that 
implements this yet-to-be-standardized mimetype activation spec so that ISVs 
can start using it in their software. Then we can start working out the 
details of the yet-to-be-standardized mimetype activation spec on this list, 
and distributions can then in the meantime, while they wait for us to finish 
here and deliver the real thing, already ship such a "desktop-launch" tool 
based on black voodoo, neural networks and/or the opinion of stock market 
analysts (I guess they will need to be downsized in order to fit on a CD).

In particular also because, once the yet-to-be-standardized mimetype 
activation spec is actually finished, I don't expect that every ISV wants to 
waste time actually implementing this spec, but instead just wants to make 
one simple call and be done with it. So we will need such "desktop-launch" 
tool sooner or later anyway.

Cheers,
Waldo
- -- 
bastian at kde.org  |   Novell BrainShare Europe 2004   |  bastian at suse.com
bastian at kde.org  | 12-18 September, Barcelona, Spain |  bastian at suse.com
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