"Portland is a new open source project that promises to simplify the deployment and commercialization of Linux applications by helping them run on multiple desktop environments, including Gnome and KDE. Although still young, Portland is available today, and it looks to be improving rapidly. Get started using the XdgUtils toolset in Portland 1.0."
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Member since:2005-07-08
Neat, but this should become unnecessary for users in short order. Distros should just set all of the external handlers for DE-neutral apps to xdg-blah by default. Then the user can select preferred handlers through their DE's configuration panels, rather than knowing XdgUtils even exists.
I'm very glad to see that Portland is happening and the initial code is already working well. I'm also happy that Portland 2.0 will provide the abstractions at the D-BUS level. D-BUS is turning out to be quite handy for implementing the "it just works" kind of features.
Member since:2005-07-07
Distros should just set all of the external handlers for DE-neutral apps to xdg-blah by default.
Some of the distros even have extended their version of the scripts to include their previously used "adapters" in the generic fallback case, e.g. Debian's xdg-open calls x-www-browser in the code branch that handles the "no DE detected" case.
The main question however is, will vendors of very common apps, e.g. Mozilla, use it, or will they stay as little integrated as possible.
Member since:
2005-07-13
Here's a post from one of the KDE devs that was published a couple of months ago, it may give a better example of how xdg-utils can be used to tweak and better integrate existing applications with non-native desktops or setups. They can be useful utilities for users, as well.
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/2535