Subject: Bug#363486: dpkg: [update-alternatives] New categories for: WORD, EXCEL, MEDIA-PLAYER etc.
Newsgroups: gmane.linux.debian.devel.bugs.general
Date: 2006-04-19 11:44:08 GMT (3 years, 42 weeks, 2 days, 23 hours and 50 minutes ago)
Package: dpkg Version: 1.13.18 Severity: wishlist There are many programs that act on a file that contains certain extension or if they support MIME types, they look up the program associated with it. The problem is that there are many programs to do the same thing. For example Person trying to open "File Manager" must remmeber that the esoteric names are xfe mfm emelfm worker krusader endeavour2 rox-filer thunar ... The same problem is with Office programs: lyx abiword oowriter ... The /etc/alternatives contains a good framework to canonicalize actions to common names available in system and to control the preferred program. SUGGESTION Create new alternatives with names something like: office-word or just Industry de facto "word" ooffice-excel or just Industry de facto "excel" file-manager archiver The X counterpart for Win32 "WinZip" media-player For video music-player For music This way numerous programs could refer to common program "music-player", which the arternatives frame work would provide. The generic names would also add simplicity to overall handling of the various binaries that would hook themselves to the alternatives base. Small window managers (Other than the KDE, Gnome, Xfce) would also benefit from this, because they could use generic menu items and call the "alternatives" name without the need to refer to certain binary, which may not be installed. -- System Information: Debian Release: testing/unstable APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: i386 (i686) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Kernel: Linux 2.6.16-1-686 Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ISO-8859-1) (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_US) Versions of packages dpkg depends on: ii coreutils [textutils] 5.94-1 The GNU core utilities ii libc6 2.3.6-7 GNU C Library: Shared libraries dpkg recommends no packages. -- no debconf information