winemenubuilder - MIME type handling GSoC - bad idea

[Damjan Jovanovic]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 1:04 AM, Rosanne DiMesio <dimesio at earthlink.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Mar 2015 16:03:21 +0100
> Michael Müller <michael at fds-team.de> wrote:
>
>>
>> Maybe Rosanne can share her opinion on this topic, since she has more
>> contact with users complaining about this "feature".
>>
>
> I'm not the least bit qualified to say what would or wouldn't be a good GSoC project, but if you're asking whether I think users would benefit from adding elaborate controls to winecfg that duplicate functions already provided by the desktop environment's tools, the answer is no. I agree with Damjan that those settings should be controlled through the host system, not Wine, and users need to learn how to use the configuration tools provided by their DE. I also see a significant downside to trying to control mimetype associations in winecfg: configuring would have to be done individually for each and every wineprefix. That's more work, not less, and speaking as a user with multiple wineprefixes, a headache I'd rather not have.
>
> As for bug 19182, the OR never asked for the complicated controls people have been proposing lately; all he wanted was a user-friendly way to completely disable mimetype associations and menu entries.  A simple checkbox on the desktop integration tab to disable winemenubuilder would accomplish that.
>

I'll have to check to make sure, but I suspect disabling associations
is harder than that, as associations for programs internal to Wine
(eg. notepad) get created during the initial wineprefix creation or
(at the latest) the first time any application (even winecfg) is run,
meaning it would be too late to uncheck a checkbox in winecfg
afterwards. Instead, it might be possible to ask the user the same way
we ask for Gecko and Mono - that hopefully happens early enough.

Regards
Damjan