Re: mc.ext is problematic by nature

[László Monda <laci monda hu>]

On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 7:45 AM, Andrew Savchenko <bircoph gmail com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On Mon, 9 Apr 2012 02:00:14 +0200 László Monda wrote:
>> As I said a bit earlier in a related discussion the relevant standards are
>> http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/mime-actions-spec and
>> http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec
>> which are implemented by Gnome 3 and which are supposed to be
>> implemented by major desktops.
>
> These are desktop conventions. Have you ever considered that mc is
> not used only on desktops? It runs on servers, routers, phones and at
> very specific environments.

Yes, I did because I use mc on dozens of servers and on two OpenWrt
routers on a regular basis.  I suggested not taking system level
associations if the relevant directories are not present on a system.

> Furthermore freedesktop specs are not mandatory. Gnome and KDE may
> follow them, but others may not; and many people doubt if they are
> sane. I remember a hell with just configuration files path changes in
> mc according to XDG. Thank's god this is now optional and one can
> disable this crap.

I didn't say that the current standards are perfect but these are the
best that we have for now.  Currently basic filename associations for
Office file formats and PDF don't work out of the box from mc on a
modern Linux desktop and let's not even speak about dozens of others.

mc could take the list of associations that are based on the
*currently installed* applications on a system and use those out of
the box.  I think it'd be a huge advantage by itself.

> Global MIME specs are faulty by design which doesn't consider that
> different applications (or even the same application) may have need
> in different application processors for a current file type.

Although I doubt that it's a showstopper please elaborate on that.

-- 
László Monda <http://monda.hu>