Have a way to dynamically change software associations at distribution level

[Jannis Pohlmann]

On Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:12:01 +0200
Jannis Pohlmann <jannis at xfce.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:24:04 +0200
> Didier Roche <didrocks at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 11:15 AM, Alexander
> > Larsson<alexl at redhat.com> wrote:
> > > 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?
> 
> The way I understood is you leave out DesignedFor for DE-independent
> apps like firefox. The question is how this works when another neutral
> web browser is installed. Via InitialPreference in the "*all* desktop
> files" fallback?
> 
> > > Default lookup would be done in two steps, first it would look up
> > > only in the apps with designed-for=$XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP. If this
> > > fails we'd do a second lookup in *all* desktop files. In each
> > > lookup the InitialPreference is used as a tie-breaker, so the
> > > priorities for e.g. core KDE apps are not affected by other
> > > desktops, but they also work for lookups from e.g. Gnome if there
> > > are no core gnome apps for that specific mimetype.
> > >
> > > Implementation wise this could be done pretty simply by storing
> > > for each mimetype implemented by a desktop file both the mimetype
> > > as-is, plus a copy of it prefixed with each of the DesignedFor
> > > keys. So, we'd do lookups for defaults first by looking for e.g.
> > > "KDE-text/plain" and then "text/plain".
> > >
> > > Opinions?
> > >
> > 
> > I think you fixed our previous concern about "look at each deskop
> > environment specific application first" with the "DesignedFor"
> > entry. However, we have to define it preciselyl to not mix up this
> > entry with the Category one.
> > 
> > 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 concept, even if the need for coordination is withdrawn with your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.
> 
> Maybe define ranges for different purposes. Dunno how many different
> priorities you really need, but e.g. if we used 50, we could say that
> in the InitialPreference
> 
>    0-30 is for upstream
>   30-50 is reserved for third party modifications (e.g. distributions)

This has to be 31-50 of course. Or 0-29/30-50 ... you get it.

  - Jannis
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