Default Program | File Association

[Alexander Larsson]

On Fri, 2008-01-25 at 12:01 +0100, nf2 wrote:
> David Faure wrote:
> > After discussion with Alexander on IRC we came to the following adjustement:
> >
> > * being able to add an application to a mimetype in defaults.list even if the application
> > .desktop file does not mention this mimetype. This removes the need for making local
> > copies of desktop files.
> >
> > * being able to remove associations, in the defaults.list file, using a separate group like this:
> > [Removed Associations]
> > image/x-xwindowdump=kview.desktop;    
> >
> > This way the app-mime association list is fully editable (you can add and remove),
> > and no duplication of system settings is done (so if the sysadmin updates his higher-level
> > defaults.list you'll still get those changes, except for the associations that have been
> > explicitely removed this way).
> >   
> >
> 
> That's cool. There is just one problem - different desktops have 
> different default applications. Thus there could be two (or more)
> 
> /usr/share/applications/KDE.defaults.list
> /usr/share/applications/GNOME.defaults.list

This is up to the distribution/sysadmin/user to handle. If you want to
do some kind of desktop-specific handling you can just add a desktop
specific directory to the XDG_DATA_DIR env var. And for extremely
specific things you can use OnlyShowIn/NotShowIn.

Doing it with two different files is a very bad idea. I mean, what file
would a third party app use? And why should a kde and a gnome app
running in the same session launch different apps for the same files?