Default Program | File Association

[David Faure]

On Tuesday 29 January 2008, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> David Faure wrote:
> >On Tuesday 29 January 2008, Stanislav Brabec wrote:
> >> David Faure wrote:
> >> > On Tuesday 29 January 2008, Stanislav Brabec wrote:
> >> >
> >> > Applications should simply install a .desktop file that describes
> >> > them. In order for the default order of applications (i.e. without
> >> > user configuration available) to be non-random, we (in KDE) use a
> >> > InitialPreference field in the .desktop file, and the default
> >> > application for a mimetype is the one with the highest initial
> >> > preference number.
> >>
> >> Hopefully GNOME does not implement InitialPreference any more.
> >> Otherwise GNOME would start KDE applications for all tasks. (It was a
> >> real problem in one of older GNOME versions.)
> >
> >OK that's a valid concern, which can be solved with
> > [InitialPreferences-KDE] and [InitialPreferences-Gnome] I suppose. But
> > this defeats the point of standardizing it I guess, we could just
> > implement our own different solutions. Fine with me. I just wanted to
> > point out that the solution is an initial preference per
> > application/mimetype combination, rather than letting applications mess
> > up defaults.list - that's the job of the user.
> 
> There's no issue of backwards compatibility here because no 
> current .desktop files have this new section. So once the desktops with 
> this new feature will not be loading old desktop's settings.

I never mentionned a backwards compatibility issue; the issue is bigger than this:
the issue is that kwrite.desktop saying InitialPreference=8 and gedit.desktop
saying InitialPreference=9 would mean that all KDE users get gedit just because
their distro installed it; and vice-versa if gedit says 7. So the concept doesn't work
in a cross-desktop manner.

> On the other hand, extending this logic to defaults.list, it means we must 
> at once stop modifying those files for any task that isn't user or 
> sysadmin preference. 

Yes.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).