(A)synchronous file operations & xdg-open

Jerry James loganjerry at gmail.com
Thu Jul 2 18:30:15 UTC 2009


On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 12:32 PM, Ville Skyttä<ville.skytta at iki.fi> wrote:
> IMO the latter is clearly preferable, and would be even a good default.  But
> then again, it might be too late to change the default as it could break stuff
> (even if the xdg-open man page doesn't document async/sync operation at the
> moment).  And I'm not sure if the tools xdg-open invokes have async/sync
> operation modes - at least some of them would quite probably need
> modifications as well.

So xdg-open currently invokes the following tools, depending on desktop:

KDE: kfmclient
GNOME: gnome-open
XFCE: exo-open

If the desktop is something else, it runs the first of these tools it
can find, checking in this order: mimeopen, run-mailcap, each element
of $BROWSER, htmlview, firefox, mozilla, netscape, links, lynx.

We already know that gnome-open operates in asynchronous mode.  In
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=435107, Kevin Kofler says
that kfmclient is also asynchronous.  Does anybody know about
exo-open?

The desktop-agnostic tools are all aimed at displaying random URLs to
the user, and would not be appropriate for the "edit a temporary file"
use-case we're talking about.

I am more and more of the opinion that xdg-open is simply the wrong
tool for viewing/editing temporary files.  It wasn't built for that
use case, and the tools it invokes were not either.  I think we need
something different altogether.  Should we go back to invoking
$EDITOR, $VISUAL, etc.?
-- 
Jerry James
http://www.jamezone.org/




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