9.1 Proposal: Legacy compatibility.

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 3:36 PM, Erik Garrison <erik at laptop.org> wrote:
> Perhaps we could also investigate the use of the xdg utilities for
> managing mimetype associations and installing activities?

Good point.  I've talked with sugar folk about this some already.  My
Journal2 code is going to use the GIO app launching mechanism, which
is based on XDG, and sugar already uses XDG mechanisms to register
mime types.  Michael's already been thinking about how we can
interpose rainbow-launch into app launching, which is not inconsistent
with the XDG mechanisms.  I think we've been a bit unsatisfied with
how XDG scatters information about activities across the filesystem
(mime types here, .desktop files there, etc); Sugar prefers the "all
information related to an activity in a single directory" model,
pioneered by NextSTEP and used in Mac OS X, etc.  I think that can be
made consistent with the XDG mechanisms, either by using a very long
XDG_DATA_DIR spec which lists all the activity directories, or by
using a userland filesystem to generate the proper XDG directory
contents based on the activity registry.  I should flesh this out and
we'll deal with the details during the presentation.
 --scott

-- 
                         ( http://cscott.net/ )