Current desktop detection / app access - take 2.

[Havoc Pennington]

On Tue, 2004-05-18 at 09:04, Mike Hearn wrote:
> 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.

A nicer solution might be an XSETTING for the current theme name, for
example, or the "metathemes" idea (in GNOME "theme" means "metatheme" so
this gets confusing).

Or more long-term, a nice spec for cross-toolkit themes.

> 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.

The problem is that the hack actively prevents us from moving toward the
standardized platform, because it gives app authors this
write-my-app-five-times-over semi-working approach to solving the same
problem. We should be living with the pain until we solve it sanely.

> > 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.

They all are pretty easy, especially compared to the full size and
effort of GNOME and KDE as a whole. The hard part is the sheer number of
items. But the only way to finish is to start.

Havoc