RFC: Autostart spec, first draft

[Kévin Ottens]

Hi all,

Le Jeudi 7 Juillet 2005 13:14, Waldo Bastian a écrit :
> First draft, your feedback is highly appreciated.

First of all, please note that I'll surely focus more on the second part of 
the draft ("Autostart Of Applications After Mount") since it's the most 
interesting part for me.

From the draft, it seems that the autostart file for a medium can be only a 
shell script. IMHO it would be better to use a desktop file. This way it 
would allow more possibilities:

1) Using a "Exec" key you could launch a script on the medium.

2) Using a "Link" key you could open a file (HTML for example) using the 
user's default application for the corresponding mimetype. It sounds 
interesting to display a short tour of the medium content. With a script it 
would be more difficult to achieve this kind of task.

For both "Exec" and "Link" it would make sense to have the $CWD be set to the 
medium root, and to allow only relative paths (".." being forbidden). The 
purpose being to launch something on the medium itself, not relying on the 
host system.

3) Using a "Description" key and a "Icon" key you could display more 
informations to the user in the confirmation prompt. It could of course raise 
some issues because the description could be written to be misleading to push 
user to execute something harmful. It would require a disclaimer in this 
case...

I can see pros and cons for "Description", but a desktop file is surely the 
way to go to introduce some flexibility and follow the user preferences.

On another note, s/media/medium/. Media is the plural form of medium.

Regards.
-- 
Kévin 'ervin' Ottens, http://ervin.ipsquad.net
"Ni le maître sans disciple, Ni le disciple sans maître,
Ne font reculer l'ignorance."
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