Re: preferred applications dialog: Mail Readers hardcoded

[Robert Love <rml ximian com>]

On Sun, 2004-01-11 at 13:59, Alexander Sack wrote:

> I noticed that the default mail applications available are hard-coded & 
> not extensible trough some configuration file mechanism.
> Is currently work done on that? I noticed that mozilla mail is in that 
> hard-coded list. Is there a chance that the next mozilla mail client 
> thunderbird will be added to that list, too??

This has been discussed a bit recently, because the GNOME Volume Manager
could really use a drop-down box of applications that do (for example)
"CD Playing" or "Photo Management" instead of exposing a file entry
widget to the user.

Hard-coded stuff definitely is not the way to go.

Some folks suggested simply adding a property to the .desktop files and
having well-defined keywords specify a sort of "MIME type for
applications."  I think this would work for everyone, you and I
included.

Adding the keywords to the .desktop file is trivial, and deciding on
standard types (perhaps they could be a spec on fd.o to facilitate
sharing with KDE) is not hard either.

Doing an API for gathering the information might be a bit more work, but
hopefully not too bad.  I am unsure, though, how to collect and
centralize the data from the .desktop files.

	Robert Love