[New] Desktop Preferred Applications Specification

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Sonntag, den 07.06.2009, 16:28 +0100 schrieb Bastien Nocera: 
> On Sun, 2009-06-07 at 14:00 +0200, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> > Am Sonntag, den 07.06.2009, 12:50 +0100 schrieb Bastien Nocera:
> > > On Sun, 2009-06-07 at 13:52 +0800, PCMan wrote:
> > > > Hi list,
> > > > To solve the issue that every desktop environment has its own way to
> > > > specify default web browser and terminal emulator, I wrote a new spec
> > > > to create a cross-desktop mechanism for this. This spec works by
> > > > extending existing XDG specs and only requires minimal changes to
> > > > existing systems without breaking backward compatibility. Besides, it
> > > > can work in an desktop independent way, and can work with existing xdg
> > > > tools like desktop-utils.
> > > > 
> > > > Here is the full specification.
> > > > http://wiki.lxde.org/en/Desktop_Preferred_Applications_Specification
> > > > 
> > > > This spec is going to be implemented by LXDE later.
> > > > 
> > > > Please give some comments.
> > > 
> > > It doesn't help with one of the problems I had with the existing GNOME
> > > setup:
> > > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=510800#c4
> > 
> > Correct me If I'm wrong, but that's a completely different issue:
> > nautilus-sendto. If we had a standard for preferred apps,
> > nautilus-sendto could also follow it.
> 
> Yes, but we'd still be missing metadata to tell us how to construct the
> commands to launch those mailers with attachments.

Why not adopt Xfce's approach? Something like:
X-XFCE-Commands=
X-XFCE-CommandsWithParameter=

> > BTW: IMO we also need a "sendto"-spec similar to what Thunar already
> > does. Then nautilus-sendto would be obsolete anyway.
> 
> What does Thunar do that would obsolete nautilus-sendto?

Why is nautilus-sendto obsolete? I still see it being used in nautilus
2.26.2. If it's obsoleted, what's it's successor?

I only mentioned Thunar as an example, because it's usage of the fdo
specs for the "send to" menu IMO is very clean and simple. Just drop a
desktop file in /usr/share/Thunar/sendto and you are ready to go. I
don't know a file manager that offers similar functionality and IMO this
should be a standard feature across all desktops - then you don't even
need a successor for nautilus-sendto.

Regards,
Christoph