Bug#348775: general: terminal emulators' alternatives settings' priorities annoy users
Hi,
On Fri, Jan 20, 2006, Simon Richter wrote:
> And GNOME would by default be configured to launch gnome-www-browser,
> thus solving the problem for GNOME users who do not set any other
> browser in gnomecc. The question for me would be whether this affects
> people who use neither GNOME nor KDE (the browsers optimized for a
> specific environment could then be demoted to some lower priority than
> the non-specific ones, perhaps?)
GNOME could then be configured to launch either sensible-browser or
gnome-www-browser (my preference would go to sensible-browser because
it makes sense system-wide, not only under GNOME).
I'm not sure about demoting the priorities. I think priorities should
decrease with the number of users because the more specific a package
is (in terms of number of users) the more likely you want it to be the
default, but I suppose there's no general rule, and it's difficult to
measure the importance of launching a browser matching the current
environment with respect to its popularity.
> > These changes were commited in galeon and epiphany's SVN, the changes
> > to sensible-browser and to firefox remain to be done.
> You mean, that they now register as an alternative for gnome-www-browser?
epiphany-browser and galeon do, yes.
> > Of course, this could be followed for KDE too.
> It should not be difficult to get that done. I had somehow expected that
> the bug report and any followups are forwarded to -devel to spark
> discussion, so I'm explicitly forwarding it there.
My response went through debian-devel when I Cc: the bug report, so
I'm continuing this way.
> Not entirely, since it isn't limited to browsers or terminals. Many
> users have personal preferences about things that are currently handled
> through the alternatives system, and the sysadmin's choice (or
> non-choice, as in the "bumping priorities" scenario) will affect them.
Yes. However, I consider that the system command sensible-browser is
user-configurable (via $BROWSER) and the GNOME environment is
user-configurable (via gconf settings), so for the browser choice front
system-wide and in GNOME, I'm satisfied with the way of things.
> For example, everytime a GNOME or KDE application launches, a lot of
> dotfiles will be created for me, so I'd like to avoid this as much as
> possible as I will only have to clean up afterwards.
Hmm, this sounds like a whole new class of problems.
Cheers,
--
Loïc Minier <lool@dooz.org>
Current Earth status: NOT DESTROYED
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