Just an idea!

[Jef Spaleta]

Bjorn Andersen wrote:
>Why not make an extension to Nautilus applications:/// so it can handle
>rpm installations? (like OS X)

Not sure if this is the best place for discussion on this
feature...maybe there is a targeted gnome development list where the
technical problems with this idea can be better flushed out....but that
being said..here is my take on the issue:

Automated placement in the correct Menu category would mean
autogenerating, or editting of the .desktop file associated with that
package. Several possible gotchas here.
What if the package has an already defined .desktop file...what if it
has none...what if the package actually installs several binary files
that should be accessible from the gnome menus...and how do you really
decide if a specific binary that the package installs needs to have an
entry in the gnome menus (surely a perl module package wouldn't get an
entry in the gnome menus)

So I guess some of this logic would be solved for if there was a
mechanism to see if the package included any .desktop files, so that any
included .desktop files could be automatically editted to use the users
preferred Category. And packages without included .desktop files...don't
get entries in the gnome menu(the assumption here being the packager
would have included a .desktop file if the package was enduser oriented
and not something like a system library or a lowlevel commandline
utility)
But even this leads to problems i guess with something like the rpm -V 
command which would flag these editted .desktop files as not being
stock. Not sure if the rpm -V issue is enough to say this feature isn't
implementable.

But the real question is...what are you trying to solve with this extra
gnome-vfs logic? Is the issue, how to add menu items to packages that
don't have menu items packaged with them? If thats it..then I don't
think this is a good solution...packagers need to included .desktop
files for the applications they expect people to use as a desktop user. 
Trying to automate the creation of .desktop files if they aren't already
there would be very hard to do right....but if you limit this feature to
only packages that already have .desktop files as part of their payload,
this might be doable with a edit of the Category inside those .desktop
files...as a sort of post rpm install scriptlet. 

And would this have applicability to only inside nautilus? I'd be more
interested if other gnome applications could get access to this sort of
thing via the gnome-vfs layer. Like when i'm downloading an rpm with
epiphany...it would be nice to be able to use the same applications://
hooks as part of the download step...but this too is probably outside
the scope of this beta list i think. I would encourage you to poke
around on the gnome mailinglists and see if there is interested parties
there in working out maybe how this would work best.

-jef"still trying to remember his bugzilla password so he can file his
own RFE's"spaleta
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/attachments/20030807/07344866/attachment.sig>