Re: gmc & cursors

[Max Karpiak <mxk purdue edu>]

Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> This happens because of two reasons:
> 
>         1. The file panels do not use metadata information because it
>            is really slow to use it on big directories or NFS-mounted
>            homes.
> 
>         2. Only desktop icons know how to open URLs.
> 
> The former is more important.  Even if you enable customization of
> icons in the file panels (from the preferences dialog), they won't
> know how to open URLs.
> 
> This inconsistency is hard to fix at this point :-(

Ahh.. I see. Well, I think that there might be a simple fix. Why use
metadata at all? We can ask gnome to tell us the value for the "default"
URL handler. Simply create a shell script called something.gURL which
calls the value for the default URL handler with the URL text.. If we
wanted to get really sly, we could have GMC export this in an
environment variable to the child (that way someone can change the value
for the default URL handler, and have the change propigated correctly).
Then things work as before. We give .gURL files their own icon, and they
behave like they should. Now things look like they should. I can move
the URLs between the desktop and the windows and keep the properties,
double clicks work again, etc. This way, we don't need to use metadata
at all.. Or, we could simply ask the powers that be in charge of the
gnome Mime types to include a mime type for .gURL that opens a file and
passes the text inside to a similarly written shell script.. or we could
make the mime type's handler be:
	gnome-moz-remote --newwin `cat %s`
and just make the .gURL file have the text of the URL inside.

Actually the last is probably the simplest and the cleanest. Metadata
and special functionality is really overkill in this case, when we can
use some slight trickiness to make things behave in a uniform way
everywhere.

Later,
Max

-- 
-------------- Max Karpiak -------------------------------------------
   Purdue CS    Lycos Systems Engineering  | "Coffee! Because you can
 mxk@purdue.edu    mkarpiak@lycos.com      |  sleep when you're dead!"
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