[arch-dev-public] An introduction to gooeydo

[Jason Chu]

On Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 06:35:38PM +0100, Phil Dillon-Thiselton wrote:
> On 27/07/07, Jason Chu <jason at archlinux.org> wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 27, 2007 at 10:45:51AM -0700, eliott wrote:
> > > To me this all reminds me of debian's "alternatives" feature.
> > > Just an observation.
> >
> > It pretty much is, only for one app and not for any app...
> >
> > While the alternatives feature was a good one, I don't know if we want
> > it... it's a little confusing and complex.
> 
> I'd just like to clarify that gooeydo was conceived only for use in
> .desktop files, not as a general command line tool.  I don't imagine
> that users would really be exposed to it, which is kind of bad, in
> terms of obfuscation.

Yeah, but the question is when will we implement another script that does
the same sort of thing for (say) setting the desktop background?

If we just keep implementing similar scripts for the user to choose between
equivalent alternatives, why don't we look at what other people are doing
to solve the problem?

My Fedora contact told me about consolehelper which they use now and
PolicyKit which they plan on moving to next release.  PolicyKit actually
looks pretty cool, even with desktop integration (using dbus, sorry Aaron).
Gnome will be moving to PolicyKit soon.  Hopefully KDE will follow.

PolicyKit is also an fd.o project, so it's pretty mainstream.

There aren't really any easy solutions to this.  It's a tough problem that
no one has solved generally.

Jason
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