Re: XDG and Freedesktop

In comp.os.linux.misc, Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

Document-application associations are an inseparable part of the whole
concept of a GUI.

Uh-huh. I think you fail to convey anything significant there.

Document-*TYPE* application associations (in the "preferences" not
"requirements" meaning of "association") existed before GUIs are are
baked into TUI and CLIs in various ways, consider $EDITOR and
mailcap configuration, which gets used by Pine and Elm.

Macintosh in the pre-"Unix inside" age (maybe still but I'm not looking
under the covers these days) associated an owner and type to a file --
an individual file -- both as four letter codes. Any program that could
open TEXT files could edit a TEXT file with say "File->Open". But if you
double-clicked an icon, it would try to use the program that owned the
file. That was a "document-application association" in the true sense.
You needed to edit the file itself to change what program would be the
default to open it, and there were power user tools to do just that.

Windows does it's own thing, the details of which I am blissfully
unaware of.

There's nothing stopping you or I from building some new system of
associations. Maybe file(1) could be modified to be a launcher. Or
a GUI could use directories as keys for the program to launch. There's
the Android model with common types managed by the OS and private
ones quite literally owned by the app (dedicated user per app along
the lines of daemons).

A Plan 9 system might create a union mount between a program and
the files for it, and under Plan 9 such mounts could be created
per process if needed.

Elijah
------
used mgr ( hack.org/~mc/mgr/ ) briefly but does not recall how it worked there