Re: [Nautilus-list] Open with Other -- how does this work, anyway?

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> Unfortunately, (1) Nautilus recognizes .lyx files as plain
> text documents -- I presume because so does file(1) -- and (2)
> since I upgraded to control-center-1.5.9-ximian.1 it's no longer
> possible (as far as I can tell) to "configure which programs are
> offered for which file types in the GNOME Control Center". (You'd
> think this is what "Default Applications" would be, but it isn't.)

Get control-center-plus, which contains the file types applet in the
advanced section. We are trying to figure out a way to make the
interface much easier to use and hopefully it can migrate back into the
"regular" section. Also, Nautilus should bring it up in Open With...

In terms of finding this... I agree that the file types association
feature could be more visible (rather than being buried within Open
With). I drafted an interface for dealing with this, but I haven't had
the time to polish it up.

> up and poorly documented. For instance, LyX files are easily
> identified by either their extension or by the fact that they
> start with the string "#LyX", but I have no idea how to inform

That would be a very hard interface problem. I think we operate off the
assumption that if the user can deduce the magic byte tag for their
type, they can add it to the configuration file themself :-) I've added
#LyX to the magic mime database for you, as well as LyX itself to the
known applications list. Eventually we'll do a GnomeVFS release with
this, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

> Nautilus (or any other part of the system) about that. Earlier,
> I ran into the problem that StarOffice 6.0b .sxw files just look
> like a ZIP archive to Nautilus -- and the same problem, I assume,
> will arise with any other file format that uses ZIP or gzip or
> tar+gzip as the last action in its save chain...

Yes. We've yelled and screamed and bitched at application developers to
not use document types without magic byte tags, but to no avail. So
we're looking at ways to cope with this. As Darin mentioned one approach
is to allow one to specify the precedence given to magic typing vs.
extensions. Another approach is to partially unzip files that are .gzs
and detect the type of the internal file (but this has an associated
performance penalty, and as you may guess we're loathe to slow Nautilus
down further!).

> Anyway, for LyX and file(1), I suppose I can hack /usr/share/magic, 
> but Joe Home User is going to want a better way. And what about mime
> types? I know there's /etc/mailcap, but I also see I have files
> in .gnome/mime-info that say "this file was autogenerated by
> gnome-vfs-mime-info, DO NOT EDIT". I'm tempted, though, since
> neither gnome-vfs nor gnome-vfs-extras seems to have any executable
> files associated with it. Any ideas?

Look in /usr/share/application-registry and /usr/share/mime-info. Also
note that GnomeVFS does not use /usr/share/magic. There's a
gnome-vfs-magic file installed somewhere. It has a lot more entries than
magic does on most systems.

-Seth