Re: how to specify the preferred control for a mime type?

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Jason,

On Mon, 2003-03-03 at 02:32, Jason Hildebrand wrote:
> Hmmm... the best-of-breed approach may work in some situations, but not
> for all.  Once pluggable editors become ubiquitous (heh! - I'm working
> on gnome-vim again), there will be machines with multiple controls
> installed for a specific mime-type, and different users who swear by
> each of them.  Users will want to be able to choose which editor will
> handle "text/plain" (and rightly so).

	Heh :-) of course.

> I haven't looked at the code behind the scenes, but the "File types and
> programs" dialog does keep track of the preferred "Viewer Component".
> This could be a naive suggestion (as I'm only a bonobo-newbie), but
> could libbonobo offer a bonobo_get_object_preferred() function which
> used these preferences to select a control?

	It's difficult to know where/how to do this really. We could add a
'default sort' order for bonobo-activation query results. It's rather
unclear how the preferred apps stuff in gnome-vfs would integrate with
bonobo-activation, etc.

	Getting a coherent scheme for such settings is rather a complicated
process, it's not clear who should depend on whom, and who should be in
charge of the data and it's synchronization. My feeling would be that it
should move 'down' from gnome-vfs - to a level shared by b-a-s and
gnome-vfs. That'd take some considerable effort though. I imagine
structurally it'd be hard to pull off.

	HTH,

		Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot