[Fedora-packaging] Calling graphical tools generically e.g. text editor

[Rex Dieter]

Tim Jackson wrote:
> I package RapidSVN, a GUI application which acts as an interface to a 
> Subversion repository. Although it has quite a lot of functionality 
> built-in, it relies on external software to perform some functions, in 
> particular:
> 
> - a text editor e.g. gedit
> - a diff viewer of some sort (ideally graphical e.g. meld)
> - a graphical directory browser (e.g. nautilus)
> 
> Currently, these require manual configuration by the user. It would be 
> nice if they worked "out of the box" and respected the user's normal 
> desktop preferences (including respecting different desktop environments 
> - GNOME/KDE/other etc.). I'm not aware of a "clean" way of doing this. 
> Is there any generic command which means "run the user's preferred text 
> editor for the current environment"? Any other bright ideas about how 
> this might be achieved or partially achieved?

You could consider using xdg-open (from xdg-utils), which is a 
command-line utility for this kind of thing.  It's purpose is to open 
files/urls using the default app of the current desktop environment 
(kde, gnome, whatever).

-- Rex