[New] Desktop Preferred Applications Specification

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On 06/06/2009 10:52 PM, PCMan wrote:
[...]
> Here is the full specification.
> http://wiki.lxde.org/en/Desktop_Preferred_Applications_Specification

Aside from other objections raised, I see a problem with your terminal 
handling.  You suggest specifying something like this in the .desktop file:

Exec=gnome-terminal -e %f

... except that won't really work.  If the user tries to launch the 
terminal from, say, the applications menu, it'll fail to load because 
the menu implementation will try to execute "gnome-terminal -e". 
gnome-terminal may behave ok if you pass -e without any parameters, and 
it may not... regardless, poor command-line option parsing isn't a 
'feature' you can rely on.

Also the terminal emulator option lacks a method to do something I 
imagine might be common -- opening the terminal emulator with $PWD set 
to a directory specified on the commandline (of course, you could do 
fork(); chdir(); exec(); but that's kinda lame).

Not sure what the best way would be to handle this... maybe through some 
custom X- prefixed keys in the desktop file, like 
X-Terminal-Run-Command-Exec= and X-Terminal-Open-Directory-Exec=.  (Of 
course, this would be a perfect job for the 'custom actions' portion of 
the desktop entry spec; a pity that was removed and there's no good 
replacement; Thunar implements it, and IMO it's pretty useful.)

Otherwise I'm ok with most of this.

One other thing -- why is there a need for a special 
application/x-web-browser fake mime type?  Why not just use 
application/x-xdg-protocol-http and application/x-xdg-protocol-https? 
Is there enough value in knowing that an app is a web browser (rather 
than just "an app that handles http/https URLs") that would justify a 
special case?

	-brian