On Sun, Aug 05, 2001 at 11:25:07AM +0200, Eduard Bloch wrote: > Hello, > > I would like to have additional alternatives symlinks. Thinks like > "editor" or "x-window-manager" are nice, and we could have more of them. > The following list contain things that I see as usefull (this is not a > proposal for policy changes, only a possible arrangement for the > future): > > html-browser > x-html-browser > > x-editor > x-pager > > mua > x-mua > news-reader > x-news-reader > > pic-viewer > x-pic-viewer > > rec-wave > x-rec-wave > play-wave > x-play-wave > (etc. for midi, mp3, ogg, video formats) > > mixer > x-mixer You're going about all of these the wrong way. The prefix "x-" in "x-window-manager" and "x-terminal-emulator" doesn't mean, "oh nifty, it brings up pretty pictures in a GUI", it means "it speaks the X protocol". Stop and consider for a moment why we don't have "window-manager" and "terminal-emulator" alternatives. Because consoles already emulate terminals and don't require window management. Most of the things you enumerate above are far better handled by MIME implementations. The exceptions I can see are "x-editor", which shouldn't be needed anyway because editors should fall back to text mode if they can't talk to $DISPLAY, and "mixer" which doesn't actually handle data, but is really just a wrapper around a bunch of ioctl()s. Even then, it may be too soon to fool with a "mixer" alternative because of the many different and incompatible ways of talking to sound hardware (OSS interface, ALSA, esd, etc.) -- G. Branden Robinson | It's like I have a shotgun in my Debian GNU/Linux | mouth, I've got my finger on the branden@debian.org | trigger, and I like the taste of http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | the gunmetal. -- Robert Downey, Jr.
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