Re: GUADEC Issue discussion summary ...

[ERDI Gergo <cactus cactus rulez org>]

On Mon, 9 Apr 2001, Michael Meeks wrote:

> Future 2. ...

And let's not forget to beat my dead horse: multiple components
supporiting the same MIME type and interface.

The basic problem is that right now, if you have a moniker like
	file:/tmp/foo.png
and there are multiple components that support image/x-png and there is a
set of interfaces that more than one of these components support, the
result of resolving this moniker to one of these interfaces is not
determined.
This is clearly not desired, since this means for example that if you open
_the same text file_ two times, you may get Emacs for the first time and
VI for the second (now _that's_ a situation with a large eeek-potential).
There should be a way for users (or administrators) to have a priority
list of components for each (mime type,interface) pair.

The problem is that there is no clear idea where this mechanism should be.
OAF may seem like a good idea, but a, OAF has nothing to do with Bonobo
b, you definitely don't want to grant users write access to .oaf files
so they can modify some obscure <priority_if mime_type="text/plain"
interface="IDL:GNOME/Desktop/Editor:1.0"> tags and c, I think this should
be stored the other way round (e.g. (mime type, interface)->(ordered list
of components) and not (component, (mime type, interface))->(priority))

If you've read my mail so far, you may be eagerly waiting for the part
where I present a solution to this problem, but regrettably, I don't have
a solution. So let's get our heads together and try to come up with some
mechanism for this case.


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