Re: Preferred Applications applet roadmap

[Luca Cavalli <luca cavalli gmail com>]

On Mon, 2006-09-11 at 11:11 +0200, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> > 
> it sounds good to me. It sounds even better if we took advantage of this
> to implement the DesktopActions thing you talk about. Would that be
> hard, or is it, if I've understood it correctly, just about adding the
> appropriate stuff to firefox/epiphany/etc .desktop files, right?

Hi,
adding and using Desktop Action with Preferred Applications can be done
in 4 steps:

1. Add the Desktop Actions to .desktop files, that is as easy as adding
a couple of lines to epiphany.desktop or galeon.desktop. Something like:

[Desktop Action NewTab]
Exec=epiphany --new-tab %U
_Name=Epiphany Web Browser (open in new tab)

2. Add necessary code to libgnome-desktop-2 to extract data from Desktop
Actions (or put it inside Preferred Apps, but libgnome-desktop-2 would
be better)

3. Add code to Preferred Apps to store .desktop file name and action
name in gconf (other than the executable path, for backward
compatibility)

4. Modify GNOME to use .desktop file + action name instead of executable
path to start default web browser, mail reader, whatever else

I think I can do points 1, 2 and 3 (if I will find all that time :), but
I will probably need some help for point 4, since I don't know well
where the relevant code is. Luckily everything will work in the
meanwhile, since the executable path will be stored in gconf as well
the .desktop file. It should then be easy for Nautilus to add Desktop
Action support too (if code from point 2. will be put inside
libgnome-desktop-2).

Ciao,

Luca