Re: Future of Default Applications

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Sat, 2009-11-14 at 18:35 +0000, Thomas Wood wrote: 
> Hi all,
> 
> 
> I've been going through the Default Applications capplet bugs in
> bugzilla and come across this:
> 
> http://bugzilla-attachments.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=68324
> 
> Which to me is just fairly horrible. If people want to add more and more
> handlers to Default Applications¹, it's going to get ugly very quickly.

This is crap, and obviously won't be integrated.

> If applications can provide an interface to set themselves as the
> default application (like many browsers already do), do we even need
> these options in the control center? If we do, then perhaps we could
> re-design this capplet so it's a bit more scalable so we can cover more
> ground.
> 
> There is already a suggestion for a slightly simpler interface². Perhaps
> we could use this an collapse most of the options into a treeview or
> something?
> 
> What do people think?

There are a number of things that the default applications is trying to
solve:
1) Supporting applications which don't use a mime-type at all:
- Terminals
2) Applications which handle only "schemes":
- SIP, Callto, mailto, etc.
- This would be needed because installing GConf schemas handling those
as Totem does (rtsp, pnm, etc.) doesn't scale when multiple applications
can handle them
3) Applications which handle both "schemes" and "mime-types":
- Web browser (default for HTML mime-type, http/https schemes)
- Multimedia apps (default for gnome-settings-daemon when pressing the
"media player" key, could make itself default for handling all the
mime-types and schemes it handles, not done now)

I believe that a system that would allow multiple applications to
register themselves as interested in handling a particular scheme would
solve most of our problems.

Cleaning up the differences between handling schemes and mime-types
might also do the code some good.

Cheers