Have a way to dynamically change software associations at distribution level

[Alexander Larsson]

On Wed, 2009-08-19 at 12:24 +0200, Didier Roche wrote:

> > * I don't believe in sharing the default priorities between desktop as
> >  some kind of global property that has to be negotiated between
> >  desktops, etc. The priorities are often used in-desktop to
> >  differentiate between two different apps in one desktop, and this
> >  doesn't work well if the same priority scale is used by another
> >  desktop too. (See the nautilus in kde example above.)
> >
> > Where does this leave us? One possible solution would be to tag each
> > application with a set of desktops that is was "designed" for
> > (DesignedFor=KDE). I.e. it would be KDE in core KDE apps, unset in
> > "normal" apps and possibly have both KDE and GNOME in some special
> > distro things that want to override desktop specific core apps in both
> > distros.
> 
> So, taking Ubuntu as an example where FF is the default for Ubuntu and
> Kubuntu (IIRC, not really sure for Kubuntu). We will patch the FF
> .desktop file to add DesignedFor=GNOME;KDE; entry?

Yes, that was my intention. Although this example does show that
"DesignedFor" is not perhaps the right name.

> I reckon that we still needs to standardize some kind of priority
> concept, even if the need for coordination is withdrawn with your
> proposal: for instance, telling than no .desktop file must have a prio
> number > 50. That will enable distros to be sure they can patch an
> .desktop file to have it by default, whenever applications is
> installed in the distros. With that, they don't have to look at all
> application prio associated with a particular MIMEType to ensure that
> one will not override their wish.

Yes, since priorities are shared for 3rd party apps, etc it would be
best to have some sort of guidelines here.