[Gpephone-devel] MIME actions (was: Re: Adding new entry to .desktop file)

[Florian Boor]

Hi!

Nils Faerber schrieb:
> So if there is the urgent need to have something *now* then I would
> agree with it. Realistically it will take several days (if not weeks) to
> get some conclusive answer.

If that's the case we just add this new entry to the desktop files. If we like
to change to another solution we can do that later on easily - its just a matter
of where the applications get this information from.
This also means that we need to write a short specification about syntax and
semantics of the new data field. Especially the list of valid actions needs to
be specified and it needs to be defined what these mean. e.g. "open" would be
ambiguous because it could mean "display", "edit"...

I have some more information about the other options and the current status of
specifications:

The fdo MIME database is widely used and several applications install override
files (usually in /usr/share/mime/packages/). These are usually used to add
custom MIME types specific for the applications. The MIME Actions as proposed in
[1] are usually not used. That is mostly because of a lacking specification for
valid actions. If we decide to go into this direction at some point we will have
the opportunity to help finishing the specification.
The major advantage of this solution is that is very flexible. The disadvantages
are that we get quite some overhead at the application startup and most likely
we need to introduce a cache for the parsed data.

Another solution would be the the the "Desktop Actions" which are an extension
to define possible actions in desktop files. An example can be found here [2].
Currently these are not part of the Desktop file specification because they were
removed in order to finish the 1.0 revision of the standards. Obviously they are
used already (e.g. in XFCE) and are going to appear again in near future.
The major advantage of these is that they are extremely flexible (we can specify
a command syntax for each action) and we do not need an extra parser because the
syntax is more or less what we have in common desktop files.

[1] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/mime-actions-spec

[2] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2006-February/006102.html


Greetings

Florian

-- 
The dream of yesterday                  Florian Boor
is the hope of today                    Tel: +49 271-771091-15
and the reality of tomorrow.            Fax: +49 271-771091-19
[Robert Hutchings Goddard, 1904]        florian.boor at kernelconcepts.de

1D78 2D4D 6C53 1CA4 5588  D07B A8E7 940C 25B7 9A76