Re: Moving "Open with" to the platform

[Mark Seaborn <mseaborn onetel com>]

Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com> wrote:

> We could do a few things:
> 
> * Move nautilus-open-with-dialog.[ch] into GTK+.  From a super-quick
> read of the code, this uses no Nautilus-only stuff except for some of
> libeel's convenience error dialogs, and some "the MIME info changed"
> signal.
> 
> * Leave the dialog in place inside Nautilus, and provide a D-Bus service
> for the "open with" GUI.  I'm 51% leaning towards this option, since
> then this would have a chance of working with a desktop-specific GUI,
> depending on your choice of desktop environment --- aside from promoting
> the use of D-Bus for this kind of stuff.

I would prefer the D-Bus approach on the grounds that using IPC for
this makes it easier to swap out the implementation.  It allows the
application and the chooser to be in different security domains, which
is important if you want to run untrusted applications without letting
them know what other applications are installed on your system.  Plash
and OLPC Bitfrost both aim to do that (though the latter not with
GNOME).

The last time I looked into using D-Bus from Python, calls had a
built-in timeout, and I couldn't work out how to switch it off.
There's a risk that this could leave a dialog unuseful after the
timeout has expired, although "Open with" would probably be a
send-only operation.

Mark