Re: preferred applications dialog: Mail Readers hardcoded

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Sun, 2004-01-11 at 19:11, Robert Love wrote:
> 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.

I've wanted to do that for a while for magicdev as well. The main
problem is that everybody and their sisters would add keywords, and they
wouldn't match, and where one would look for those desktop files.
The actual code is piece of piss.

---
Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net> 
There may be no 'I' in team, but there's a 'ME' if you look hard enough.