Re: app wrappers and gworkspace

[Jonathan Shipley]

Enrico Sersale <enrico@dtedu.net> writes:

> Regarding the wrappers: the first thing that I must say is that I
> cant't mainten them; all the wrappers distributed with GWorkspace are
> contributions of its users. And, they are *not* GWorkspace parts, they
> are GNUstep applications!  Anyway, I consider Raffael Herzog's
> GSWrapper the best solution for create and edit existing wrappers; and
> also a parser of /usr/share/applications would be a nice thing.  But
> Gworkspace will never do itself this work; it doesn't know anything
> about applications and their location; when you double click on a icon
> GW only sends a -openFile: or -openFile:withApplication: to the shared
> instance of the NSWorkspace class; nothing else.

It's good to see you here, Enrico!

If I am reading you correctly you are not opposed to simplifying the the
process of opening applications from gworkspace.  Indeed, it can only be
beneficial to all gworkspace users.

It's also good to see that work is being done on creating a graphical
way to make and edit wrappers.  This is in the spirit of ease-of-use.

I would like to see a way forward, that we can all agree on, as to how
to solve this issue.  It seems that many people agree with me that the
current solution is sub-optimal.

Even if we agree to make many new app wrappers so that all possible
applications are covered, there will be the problem that an average user
will not have many applications installed.  As things stand, in the
gworkspace preferences we would be presenting users with options for
opening files that would not work on their system.  I believe that this
is not in the spirit of ease of use that GNUstep stands for.  At the
very least gworkspace would have to be modified to try and weed out apps
that didn't work.

This method also introduces much waste - the unneeded app-wrappers,
which furthermore will require constant maintenance.

This maintenance seems unnecessary to me given that it seems to be
duplicating the work of the freedesktop standard.

You seem to think that it is feasible to write a parser to make GNUstep
apps out of the .desktop entries.  Could you provide some technical
direction as to how this could best be done?  Perhaps when we know what
needs doing we will find a suitable volunteer(s) for this crucial aspect
of the user-interaction.  You needn't provide all the details right now,
but rather if you could simply agree to it.

Once we know what needs doing and have an idea of how long it will take
we should take a view on whether we need to invest time now in
constructing more app-wrappers, as a short term measure for those
distro's that need them. 

I suspect that everyone will be pleased to know that your time is being
spent on the core work of gworkspace.

Many thanks for everyone's contribution so far.
-- 
Jonathan