Cleaning up "Preferred Applications" & Desktop Consistency

[Karl DeBisschop]

On Wed, 2003-12-31 at 02:01, Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> Havoc Pennington <hp at redhat.com> writes:
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Couple high level points:
> > 
> >  - consider posting this sort of thing to fedora-desktop-list in future
> >  - jrb is currently redoing the MIME UI using a 
> >    freedesktop.org backend; don't know if this also covers 
> >    "preferred applications" but it probably should
> 
> We've gone back and forth on this on the GNOME/freedesktop lists, and
> the consensus is that things like preferred applications really isn't
> part of the MIME system.

A while ago, I brought up the idea of extending alternatives to have a
per-user interface as well as a system-wide interface. That was shot
down because alternatives is somewhat inelegant. At that time, people
suggested that in the long term term, MIME types could replace
alternatives. 

Sounds like this is no longer true, but I would just like to bring up
the original point that it would be nice if the mechanism for a user's
preferred application had some relation to the system default as well. 

For example, as an administrator, I may install galeon, epiphany,
mozilla, and firebird, but then tell my users they are free to choose,
but I will only support firebird. So I would like as an administrator
that I can specify a default for 'browser', and my users can choose to
depart from that.

Further, I would expect some relation between the mechanism for changing
the system default and a user's personal default. Much the way we have
/etc/profile and ~/.profile today. If work is being done to reimplement
preferred applications, I for one would appreciate it if this relation
to system-wide applications could be kept in mind.

-- 
Karl DeBisschop <kdebisschop at alert.infoplease.com>