Default Program | File Association

[Alexander Larsson]

On Tue, 2008-01-29 at 14:37 +0100, Stanislav Brabec wrote:
> Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > On Tue, 2008-01-29 at 13:48 +0100, Stanislav Brabec wrote:
> > 
> > > > 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?
> > > 
> > > Doing it using XDG_DATA_DIR is also a bad idea - GNOME and KDE are not
> > > ready to install desktop files to different directories, if they share
> > > the same prefix. And you want to use KDE applications on GNOME (or vice
> > > versa), if there is no appropriate application in your desktop.
> > 
> > There is no need to install the desktop files in these dirs, they can
> > still go to a shared dir. Just the defaults.list file (and whatever
> > other desktop specific config stuff you need).
> 
> Ah, I understand. One special XDG_DATA_DIR containing only defaults.list
> and maybe several desktop files for desktop specific applications...
> 
> It gives sense.
> 
> But it does not fix following problem:
> 
> It is a very complex task to create correct defaults.list using the
> current format. For example (GNOME), you have to do manually:
> 
> - Fill eog.desktop for all image MIME types mentioned in eog.desktop
> 
> - Find all MIME types not mentioned in eog.desktop but opened by another
>   GTK/GNOME viewer and fill this viewer to these MIME types.
> 
> - Find all MIME types not opened by any of above and fill generic image
>   viewer there.

All these will be picked up automatically. But yes, gnome does not yet
have a way to prioritize the apps not in the defaults.list file (kde has
its own way). We need to implement something for this to avoid the
default being seemingly random.