[arch-general] Automatic File Associations Alloting

[Jayesh Badwaik]

Hi,

All the programs, mimeo, xdg-open are oriented towards using mime info
to open application. My problem is different. What I want is a way to
tell "my" desktop environment or whatever to use which applications.

The main issue is as follows.  Every program that gets installed can
do anything to the mimeinfo.list file. Sometimes, it will also change
the xdg-open values. There are multiple systems with multiple
standards. We cannot do much about that. However, what we can do is,
we can make it easy to create an interface to program that.

My suggestions is as follows.
All file associations would be stored in a XML based file. There will
be other details in it. But the main details is as follows
1. mime-type
2. associated applications wuth priority starting from 1. Why exactly
one, will be clear later.

Now whenever a new package is installed. It will contain an XML file
containing description of the mimetype in the same manner. When the
package is installed, the file will be transferred to a folder. The
main file which contains the descriptions of the mime type will be
somewhere else. This folder will contain the mime files which have not
yet been incorportated into the main file.

Now, a program would run which will take this folder and the original
file as the default arguments and then update the file types. If there
is a conflict, especially if the priority of the application for the
mime type is already taken, then there can be a ncurses based
resolution window, letting window resolve the conflict (modeled on the
file association selectors in Windows applications). The priority in
the package files can be -1 if the file wants to go to the last
priority if possible. (like the nice factor of the processes)

But no one can occupy the priority zero. Suppose a user opens an app
using open with command and then checks the box, then automatically an
entry is created in the folder with priority zero and then it is
updated. This way, automatic software will never trump the user set
defaults under any circumstances and the conflict management would
prevent the irritation at the file open time. I am sure people are
more careful during install than they are during file opening.

Now the final XML file is created. This file can be then modified into
whatever is demanded by any DE etc etc. What do you think?


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cheers and Regards
Jayesh Vinay Badwaik
Electronics and Communication Engineering
VNIT, INDIA
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On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 3:45 PM, SanskritFritz <sanskritfritz at gmail.com> wrote:
> Since mimeo also supports file uris now, there is no need to change
> this package anymore.