Hi,

On Tuesday 22 February 2011 17:27:10 Nicolas Dufour wrote:

...

De : Martin Owens <doctormo@...400...>

It sounds like you've programmed to the Windows concept of selecting program file via their exe file. Which isn't how XDG/FreeDesktop systems work (gnome, kde etc), these use .desktop files in known locations which have translated names, icons and descriptions of the program.

Have I gotten the right end of the stick, that you've modified the file selection dialog to allow you to select executable files from the file system?

Yes, you're right. I wanted to reproduced the Scribus external apps preferences dialog (ok, it's not a gnome application...), and wasn't aware it could harm to do that. I also wanted it to work with command lines in order to allow OSX users to use 'open' commands. Regarding the gnome concept, the old inkscape list was not better than the new selector since it just listed some manually chosen applications. How should we handle that specific preference then? Just let a simple text entry (full command line)? Auto-detect installed applications and add a command line arguments entry field?

GTK+ 3 includes a widget for selecting an application[1], but it seems it is not present in GTK+ 2, unfortunately, so it probably cannot be used right now in inkscape. As for where to get the list of applications (if it is not good enough to have an entry field+file selector until inkscape is ported to GTK3), I think the Desktop Menu Specification[2] at freedesktop.org might be helpful.

[1] http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/unstable/GtkAppChooserDialog.html [2] http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/

Do you have links to applications that successfully uses that concept on all platforms?

Short term (for now, I don't want to spend too much time on it if it requires too much work), should we keep the patched version or revert the changes? If it's just a problem with the selector, we could just keep the entry field and the context menu changes so that bitmap editing works on OSX and Windows.

I have not tried the feature, nor do I open bitmaps from within inkscape directly, but I think an ability to choose any program is better than a choice of few preconfigured programs, especially since a user may have those programs installed in non standard locations.

Regards, Martin Sucha