Current desktop detection / app access - take 2.

[Alan Johnson]

> > I wouldn't even have a setting for VFS. Instead, make a wrapper library
> > that the user can configure to use one or the other. You have to write
> > this code anyway if you want to support both systems, so you might as well
> > share it. Other programs will surely find it easier to link against this
> > library than to write support for both systems.
>
>         It's a nice idea, but in the OO.o case - since you have to plug it into
> an existing abstraction, having yet another abstraction would be, well
> painful :-)

I understand that in terms of existing applications such as OO.o, it
isn't realistic to tear all of the existing abstraction, or to
abstract the abstraction, but at the same time under the DESKTOP=foo
concept existing applications would require significant modifications.
This would most probably be some sort of wrapper that generalizes kio
and gnome-vfs. Why not make this wrapper universal?

At the same time, I can see this as not being related to the
discussion. DESKTOP=foo is the basis for the wrapper, not vice-versa,
and I'm sure that no one will get mad if someone were to write the
wrapper, assuming DESKTOP=foo became an accepted concept. And I guess
really the wrapper idea just makes more of a case for having a method
for determining the features of the desktop.

Ideally, it seems, DESKTOP=foo would be a migration path for the most
part. We don't have a standardized vfs, so we need DESKTOP=kio or
DESKTOP=gnome-vfs for those applications that aren't gnome or kde
specific. But, ideally in the future the wrapper could be filled out
to be a full vfs api, and the DESKTOP=kio or DESKTOP=gnome-vfs could
be deprecated.

Alan Johnson