Re: Moving "Open with" to the platform

[Cosimo Cecchi <anarki lilik it>]

On Tue, 2008-03-18 at 14:02 -0600, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Right now, the "Open with another application" dialog lives in
> nautilus/libnautilus-private/nautilus-open-with-dialog.[ch].  This
> dialog uses the machinery in GIO's GAppInfo to figure out which apps can
> be used to open a file of a certain MIME-type.
> 
> There's a long-standing annoyance in Firefox, where it implements "open
> with" by starting a file chooser in /usr/bin.  Now, if you complain
> about the file chooser *right here* I will ignore your mail :)  My point
> is that it would be nice if the "open with" GUI were available to all
> apps, not just Nautilus.
> 
> 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.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Oh my god, this is a nice little project for the Summer of Code... it
> would involve figuring out the above, and also changing Firefox to use
> it :)

Hi Federico,
I started working some time ago on a similar request for Epiphany [1],
and I think this may be useful to other applications too.
On the other hand, there are requests [2] for a Nautilus D-Bus API not
just for this task, and it would be a good idea to implement it (maybe
even as a standardized spec for file managers?).
I also lean towards the D-Bus API, as that would potentially bring much
more integration across the desktop, but I have to say that having this
in GTK+ could allow creating nicer UIs for this kind of things.

[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=163827
[2]
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2008-March/msg00047.html

Cheers,

Cosimo