[jokosher-devel] Extensions

["Stuart Langridge" <sil kryogenix org>]

Excellent work on the ExtensionsAsEggs page on the wiki, I have to say!

I have had a thought. Do we think it's worth having a special filetype
for J extensions? My oh-so-clever run-an-extension-directly trick
doesn't work with .egg files anyway, so I wonder whether we should
just make both .py extensions and .egg extensions be called
.jokosher-extension or similar. That has a few benefits:

1. It makes it very clear that something's a Jokosher extension
2. We get a nice icon for them
3. We can ship a tiny program that .jokosher-extension files are
associated with; when someone clicks one directly to run it, the
little program says "this is a Jokosher extension; would you like to
install it?" and then moves it to the .jokosher/extensions folder if
they say yes (this is what the oh-so-clever code does, but it doesn't
work for .egg files and it's too complicated anyway)
4. It makes it a lot easier to build the Big Directory Of Extensions
on extensions.jokosher.org at some point in the future, because it's
just the results of a filetype:jokosher-extension Google search :)
5. If you have an extension file and don't have Jokosher, it should at
least allow you to guess what it is if it's called
whatever.jokosher-extension

Downsides:
1. I don't know whether Nautilus will actually recognise files as J
extensions just because of a filename; they are *actually* .py or .zip
files under the covers. What does Nautilus do with .egg?
2. The file doesn't do anything at all if you have one and don't have
Jokosher installed, even if you run it. (That's the case for .egg
files anyway, though.)

sil

--
"Out of the frying pan and into the very same, identical frying-pan.
Smegging great."
         -- Lister, "Last Human"