All of these seems to be steering closer and closer to theDebian alternatives database, could we just use that with a mime type instead of a task name? It already has support for applications to add/remove themselves with a priority number, allows the user to easily change priority and/or set which one to use.
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/91 -----Original message----- From: David Faure [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 11:17:17 -0500 To: Stanislav Brabec [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Default Program | File Association > On Tuesday 29 January 2008, Stanislav Brabec wrote: > > > > It is a very complex task to create correct defaults.list using the > > current format. For example (GNOME), you have to do manually: > > > > - Fill eog.desktop for all image MIME types mentioned in eog.desktop > > > > - Find all MIME types not mentioned in eog.desktop but opened by another > > GTK/GNOME viewer and fill this viewer to these MIME types. > > > > - Find all MIME types not opened by any of above and fill generic image > > viewer there. > > > > It is even a fragile task - if any of the image viewers is removed, > > there is no way to find "second best fit" and application has to choose > > randomly. > > The above is exactly why applications should *NOT* touch defaults.list files > IMHO. > Those files exist to save the user's preference, possibly a sysadmin > preference, but only that. > > Applications should simply install a .desktop file that describes them. > In order for the default order of applications (i.e. without user > configuration available) > to be non-random, we (in KDE) use a InitialPreference field in the .desktop > file, > and the default application for a mimetype is the one with the highest > initial preference number. > > You might say: but then every application will use 4 billion or more in that > field, > but I have actually never seen that happen (and this would be equivalent with > app installers > modifying defaults.list anyway, so no difference there). > In practice people use reasonable numbers (between 1 and 10) and this feature > allows KDE releases to come out with a predefined application order, which > allows to > make sure that the order isn't stupid: for instance, even though karbon can > sort > of import postscript files (so karbon.desktop mentions > application/postscript), kghostview > was a much better default application for viewing postscript; so we simply > made > sure that kghostview had a higher InitialPreference than karbon. > This example also shows that InitialPreference really has to be per-mimetype > supported > in a given desktop file, not just for the whole desktop file (although that's > good enough > in 95% of the cases of course). Hence my suggestion in a previous mail, for a > new > section in .desktop files which defines per-mimetype initial preference: > [InitialPreferences] > text/plain=2 > application/postscript=6 > > (this makes this application preferred over another app that has <6 for > application/postscript, > but if a third application handles text better then it will be used instead > of this one). > > I would really like this clean solution (cleaner than kde's current hack for > per-mimetype preference numbers) to be added to the desktop entry standard. > > -- > David Faure, [EMAIL PROTECTED], sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE, > Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org). > _______________________________________________ > xdg mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg > _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
