Re: GNUstep equivalent to the "open" tool.

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Sunday, March 25, 2001, at 06:55 PM, Tom Hageman wrote:

> On Sat, 24 Mar 2001 18:37:50 -0800 (PST), Gregory Casamento wrote: 
> > Under OPENSTEP4.2 and MOSX an applications supported extensions 
> > are added to the "suffixes" database when the application is docked. 
>  
> Actually, in NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP the app does not necessarily have to be   
> docked in order to collect its extension info.  (that would mean that only   
> documents associated with docked apps would be double-clickable, which in   
> light of the limited number of slots available in the NS/OS dock would   
> give rather a poor user experience.) 
>  
> In fact, what happens is that when the user logs in, or later chooses   
> "View > Update viewers" in Workspace, _all_ apps in a few known   
> directories, and subdirectories thereof, are scanned (by default ~/Apps   
> /LocalApps /NextApps /NextDeveloper/Apps /NextAdmin /NextDeveloper/Demos   
> on NS/OS; this could be changed by setting the ApplicationPaths default),   
> and their extension info is collected into the suffixes database.  This   
> database  is subsequently used by NSWorkspace to associate document   
> extensions with application paths. 

This is how it works in GNUstep also.  What's missing (I checked on my
NeXTstep system) is that when you dock and app, it gets added too this
database even if it is not in one of the well-known directories.

> > Since WindowMaker is being used to dock our applications how should we 
> > provide similar functionality under GNUstep? 
>  
> make_services might be a natural candidate, as it already scans the apps   
> for services info. 

Yes ... make_services already does this job in GNUstep.