[PD-dev] [ pure-data-Feature Requests-1413772 ] use file associations on GNU/Linux

[Frank Barknecht]

Hallo,
IOhannes m zmoelnig hat gesagt: // IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:

> Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> >Currently, Pd uses firefox or mozilla.  Windows has "rundll32  
> >url.dll,FileProtocolHandler", Mac OS X has "open", both are command  
> >line apps.  I can't think of a GNU/Linux equivalent, it would be good  
> >to have instead of mozilla/firefox.
> 
> i don't know whether this is standard, but on debian at least you have 
> /usr/bin/x-www-browser which is supposed to point to the preferred 
> graphical browser (however, this is a system wide setting and not per 
> user and probably a hack anyhow...)

It's Debian-specific (and thus could be incorporated into Pd-debs) and
part of the "alternatives" mechanism in Debian. This is handled
through configuration in /etc/alternatives/ which currently is just a
bunch of symlinks for any major app-group. I think, this is to
simplify scripting in Debian and stuff like Menu-generation etc. E.g.
there also is "x-terminal-emulator" which can be used by command line
apps that need to be started through a Window Manager Menu entry (for
example "x-terminal-emulator -title Mail -e mutt").

However this does not actually deal with filetype-associations. For
this, I would again propose to use the mime-type setup present on
practically all Un*xes (and probably somehow also on OS-X and on
Windows). This would allow to open files directly in the preferred
application instead of first going through a browser which in turn may
look in /etc/mailcap and /etc/mime.types anyway. Moz/Firefox does so
as a fallback.

A very quick implementation on Debian would be to use run-mailcap(1)
instead of opening Firefox/Mozilla. Examples:

  $ run-mailcap /usr/lib/pd/doc/1.manual/index.htm
  $ run-mailcap /usr/lib/pd/doc/1.manual/fig1.1.png

I'm not sure, if other distributions have similar tools, but
run-mailcap can be included in Pd directly as code (it's public
domain).

I did a tiny bit of googling and also found this regarding the
Freedekstop view, which would support Gnome and later maybe KDE as
well: 
http://www.freedesktop.org/Standards/shared-mime-info-spec

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                 _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__