[Xesam] Wrapping up for Xesam Search Spec RC3

Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen mikkel.kamstrup at gmail.com
Thu Sep 4 11:18:42 PDT 2008


2008/9/4 Michael Albinus <michael.albinus at gmx.de>:
> "Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen" <mikkel.kamstrup at gmail.com> writes:
>
>>> I believe, this is too restrictive, because it would prevent Xesam to
>>> run in environments, where applications are not identified via
>>> .desktop files. Imagine other operating systems ...
>>
>> My personal opinion is that we mainly target the freedesktop.org
>> operating systems, but this has never really been discussed...
>
> That's true, but who knows ... I can also imagine running Xesam
> without any desktop, just plain ASCII screen (you know my Emacs
> background :-)

But also on a machine without any .desktop files installed? .desktop
files are applicable also to systems without graphics. And btw, as you
point out yourself matching apps by mimeType will still take you a
long way.

>>> And there is also the problem, that there might be different
>>> applications, which could be able to handle the URL in question, for
>>> example an KDE application, and a Gnome application. Which application
>>> shall be chosen by the search engine then?
>>
>> In cases where multiple programs can open the url it is likely that no
>> urlVendor should be set. The idea was to only set it for
>> vendor-specific urls. Ie for pointers into Evolutions email cache etc.
>
> Evolution is desktop neutral. But what if there are different desktop
> specific applications, which are able to handle a hit? Like a zip
> browser, which could exist as "kzip" and "gnomezip" (just hypothetical
> names, don't beat me!).

No, Evolution is Gnome's email client. In your zip example the app
consuming Xesam must know this relation between kzip and gnomezip a
priori and can make the decision if it sees kzip or gnomezip in
xesam:urlVendor.

Alternatively we could call it xesam:urlSchema which could then either
be application private, or name a general standardized url schema. In
the zip case my private hacky KamstrupZip would just use
urclSchema=kamstrupzip, but the lean and mean OpenZip and FossZip both
use urlSchema=standardzip


-- 
Cheers,
Mikkel


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