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

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Jan 25, 2006, at 5:55 PM, Frank Barknecht wrote:

> 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

That sounds better than using firefox/mozilla to me.  Anyone want to  
submit a patch?  I guess we'd have to find out how prevalent  
run-mailcap is.  Or do:

run-mailcap $filename | firefox $filename | mozille $filename

which just modifies the line that's there.

.hc

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                             http://at.or.at/hans/


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