console/desktop integration

[George]

On Mon, Aug 09, 2004 at 12:01:30PM +0200, Dennis Heuer wrote:
> The more I discuss about the problem the more I see that people do not even
> want to see the problem because they see things from only their position,
> their project and their ivory tower. Eventuality, d-bus, gconf etc. are all
> future solutions not playing well with today's console tools. Console tools
> would have to support this future vision which means that the developers
> must do far more than they'd have to for my idea. So, what's the point
> about "not getting developers to support it". As I wrote, not every tool on
> earth must support it. And, most apps support "-h,--help" or "-v,--version"
> or "-u,--usage" in either way today. That not really all (100%) tools
> support these parameters doesn't mean anything. It's like not all archives
> support configure/make. However, more than 80% do, and you always find an
> alternative app using it.

But how do you decide if something supports such arguments short of running
it?  So you'd need some sort of registration or .desktop files or whatnot
anyway.  So what's the point of your solution?

So I suppose you run the program the moment the user enters it, well 1) there
are so many damn binaries on a system this is highly unuseful 2) what if I by
mistake enter something that is dangerous and it gets executed fairly
arbitrarily.

If you understand command line and are able to understand which command is
supposed to be run, you can figure out the arguments yourself.  If not there
should be some nice gui way of registering these action for a drop down menu
somewhat like havoc pointed out through .desktop files.  It would not be hard
at all to add support for keys like "X-GNOME-HandleCD=" and use them, far,
FAR simpler then some whacky dynamic command line argument editor.  I don't
want to edit the command line arguments.  99% of people that want to change
that field just want to specify which CD player they want to run.  Yes that's
a statistic I completely pulled out of my ass and I'm completely convinced
that it's true despite that.  GUI programs should not be configurable through
command line anyway but through it's configuration which is already gui.

Of course such a HandleCD key should really be shared between kde and gnome
since I could consievable like some kde cd player better then some gnome one.
So perhaps someone should make a proposal for addition of something like this
to the .desktop format.

George

-- 
George <jirka at 5z.com>
   Then, when you have found the shrubbery, you must cut down the mightiest
   tree in the forest... with... a herring!
                       -- The Knights Who Say 'Ni'