SuggestedPackagesForFiletypesSpec

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Ubuntu does not install packages for every file type there is but if a user wants to open a document that is not supported out-of-the-box there should be a option to install the required package(s) to work with that file type. Ubuntu does not install packages for every file type in the world. If a user wants to open a document that is not supported out-of-the-box there should be a option to install the required package(s) to work with that file type.

Summary

Ubuntu does not install packages for every file type in the world. If a user wants to open a document that is not supported out-of-the-box there should be a option to install the required package(s) to work with that file type.

Rationale

We have the information about the suppported mime-types for most packages via the desktop files already. This information should be used to present a user-friendly way to install packages.

Use cases

  1. Alice clicks on a .xxx document and gets a error message that this file-stype is not supported. She is frustrated by the lack of options.

Scope

Modifications to gnome-app-install and nautilus packages needs to be done.

Design

The information about the supported filetypes is part of the desktop file for the applications. We generate a cached version (pickle?) of the desktop-files database that contains the required information for gnome-app-install.

If a user clicks on a unsupported filetype with nautilus it should talk to gnome-app-install (either via dbus or the commandline) and make it show a dialog of the applications that could possibly open that file-type. Those applications should be ranked with the popcon information and it should be a subset of the normal gnome-app-install window (without the sections on the left and the search field on the top). Nautilus needs to pass the mime-type and the actual path to the file to gnome-app-install. When the user selects "install" and it is installed, g-a-i should open the file with the just installed application.

The interface should honor the "show unsupported", "show restricted" selections of the user. If that results in not showing any application to the user we need to show a entry that explains that with the current view setting nothing can be displayed but that this can be changed with the view settings. If the user selects a proprietary application (like RealPlayer) the usual dialog about adding Channels/LicenseUri comes up.

The actual interaction can be done with the commandline because some packages (like firefox) do not support dbus. But additional dbus support should be added.

Implementation

No code has been written yet.

Open issues

The lookup if the mime-type can be supported needs to be very fast (and pre-cached) because if we actually do not have any package that supports the given mime-type we need to tell nautilus so that it can display a error dialog. That one should be better worded than the current: "Couldn't display '%s'". Something like "There is no application available to view: '%s'" is more appropriate.

CategorySpec

SuggestedPackagesForFiletypesSpec (last edited 2008-08-06 16:37:32 by localhost)