On Friday 09 September 2005 09:31, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote: > > If we want to be half clever, that is what we would be doing. It may > be good enough for you, but personally, I'd rather be fully clever...[*] > > We are not supposed to guess for the user what its preferences are. On > OS X and windows, things are easy in theory: the user can specify what > program should be used for what extension. Then the commands "open" or > "start" are just the ``perfect'' viewer. > > On linux, it would be nice the investigate whether freedesktop or > whoever has specified a way to get this information, through mime > types or whatever. For example, when the program www-browser exists, > is it reasonable to assume that it is the user's preferred browser? > If there a desktop-agnostic way to open a file?
This is precisely the point. We always took a neutral stance on this although more and more unix is linux. Are we ready to take the next step? FWIW in the previous paragraph linux stands for any of the free operating systems, mainly linux + .*bsd > Frankly, deciding how to open a file should not be our problem. But it will not happen for the next years. That said I agree with you that we should, if possible, delegate that task to the underlying environment. > JMarc > > [*] of course, I am also trying to escape the addition of a lot of > ugly code in lib/configure :) No smiles please... remember Friday. (Says Robinson Crusoe) -- José Abílio
