Re: Appearance of the new Add-Application dialog

[Jürg Billeter <j bitron ch>]

On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 21:05 +0200, Christian Neumair wrote:
> Am Dienstag, den 27.07.2004, 04:49 +0200 schrieb Mathias Hasselmann:
> > Am Mo, den 26.07.2004 schrieb Alan um 4:11:
> > > On Sat, Jul 24, 2004 at 05:11:19PM -0700, Mason Kidd wrote:
> > > > I would actually suggest that the 'Add Application' dialog match the
> > > > 'Run Application' dialog, so that when it is expanded, it shows a list
> > > > of 'Known Applications'.
> > > 
> > > +1
> > > 
> > > I think that showing the user the filesystem layout, even through the
> > > file chooser, should be a last resort (or 'advanced' in this case).
> > 
> > Yup, letting alone with the thousands of binaries an average *nix system
> > contains, would be quite "uncool". That's why I see some "Applications"
> > shortcut in the expanded file browser, pointing on some virtual folder
> > listing known applications. Maybe this shortcut could be preselected.
> 
> I think this is a bit odd. If an application installs a desktop file, it
> is supposed to add a MimeType field and is therefore added
> automagically. If it doesn't, we ought to bug the app author.
> Since known applications basically are the ones that have a desktop file
> associated with them, the onliest use-case of adding an application is
> in fact that you want to choose one of the thousands of binaries.
> The primary idea of the new MIME system is to make it very simple for
> app authors to associate an application with a MIME type.

In theory you're absolutely right. But fact is that almost all changes
of file type handlers, I've made so far in gnome, affected programs
which have a .desktop file. You can't deny that there are gnome
applications (probably not the one from the desktop release but still
gnome applications) which create .desktop files but either didn't
(correctly) register the mime type at all or didn't convert yet to the
new MIME system. So if we don't provide a nice list, many programs can't
be easily associated with a file type as they haven't been converted to
the new MIME system yet.

Even if we hadn't such transition problems I'd vote for adding an
application list to te dialog as there are and will always be
applications which don't corretly register themselves with the mime
system. Besides that there will always be the possibility of bugs in
shared-mime-info which can lead to the same problems. So, why make it
hard for the user?

Regards,

Jürg

-- 
Jürg Billeter <j bitron ch>