unity-design team mailing list archive

[Ted Gould <ted@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2009-09-03 at 17:42 +0300, Juha Siltala wrote:
> Is this true? Don't we set our preferred apps in gconf? Can it 
> not be asked for this information?

There is currently a way to set the preferred applications for a few
categories, which then saves the setting in GConf.  But that's a problem
for a few reasons.

By looking there we'd artificially limit the menu to be a few categories
that we dictate.  We'd be choosing a "mail" app, an "IM" app, etc.  When
in reality there are going to be new categories that we don't quite
understand, especially when they start.  As an example, I have a patch
to the lp-tools[1] that puts code reviews in the messaging menu.  If
someone requests me to code review something on Launchpad it pops up
there and I can click on it to do the review.  It'd pretty silly for us
to have "preferred code review platform."

By using GConf we're locking ourselves into only GNOME apps.  There are
a ton of people that do things like run Ubuntu and use apps like KMail.
They should get the same experience as those who like Evolution.

The data in those settings is stale at best and doesn't reflect the
applications that are actually installed.  GConf doesn't really have a
good way for us to do something like Debian alternates for the default
default.  We could definitely invent something, but it gets pretty crazy
pretty quick.  Applications also don't look at it to provide a way to
set them as the default.  It would be pretty obtuse to set the values
for users as they're not prevalent.

Sometimes users use more than one application of a particular category.
A common use case is that people will use XChat for IRC and Pidgin for
other IM networks.  There are other cases like Evolution for corp.
e-mail and GMail for home.  A single preferred app doesn't work.

All in all, I think that the default installed applications work as a
seed for the menu as good as having preferred applications.

		--Ted

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