XDG Default Applications specification proposal

[Emmanuele Bassi]

On Fri, 10 Jul 2020 at 10:08, David Edmundson <davidedmundson at kde.org>
wrote:

>
> I don't like the idea of duplicating configuration for the options where
> it's already solved with mimetypes. If we have two "sources of truth" for
> the same thing, it can get complicated quickly.
>
>
A terminal isn't a handler for any MIME type, or any URI, and adding fake
MIME types isn't going to scale either—it's just kicking the can down the
road when we have to keep adding new fake MIME types and hope that stuff
works.


> There's an idea in the annex "Use a new mime type (ex:
> x-default-handler/*) instead of a new list". Can you expand on why you
> didn't pursue that approach?  It seems a lot easier to adopt.
>

The whole discussion started off because GLib developers do not really want
to add a settings key for this; it's a bad option, for us, as it falls
apart when it comes to system and vendor overrides, and it plays really
badly in mixed systems (e.g. GNOME applications can't really read KDE
settings, and vice versa): https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/338

The idea of using a special MIME type handler was rejected (by one of the
maintainers of the shared-mime-info database) here:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/338#note_205947

Having a separate, neutral way to associate default applications that do
not open files/URIs seems perfectly legitimate to me; modelling it on the
MIME type handler means we can reuse a lot of the concepts, if not the
implementations.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
https://www.bassi.io
[@] ebassi [@gmail.com]
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