Hi,

On Wed, 3 Nov 1999, David Faure wrote:

> I just realized something...
> 
> The DefaultApp field for a mimetype was removed in order
> to prevent overriding the user's preferences when upgrading KDE.
> But I thought _services_ would hold a preference (as a number)
> so that when installing acroread AND kghostview, kghostview becomes
> default (and so that when installing only one, that one's used).
> 
> This is not the case. The preference number is in the user's profile.
> This is what confused you, and now confuses me as well.
> I agree, this doesn't make sense.
> The user's profile should simply say "my preferred service for X is Y".
> 
> If this makes sense, kuserprofile should be changed to read
> the preferences from the _services_ files and read from the profile
> only the preferred app.
> But obviously Torben had another way of seeing this...

Indeed. At my university they install and remove software as they like.
Sometimes I have gv, sometimes not, then I use ghostview. The idea
of setting numbers was to say: If available I prefere gv, otherwise
ghostview and the rest I really dont like.

if you only store the name of the preferred service then you dont
know what to do if this preferred service is not available.

I had another szenario. You travel with your notebook from office
to office and you use services installed on the offices network, like
printer services, additional applications etc.
Giving only a preferred service now is a problem since in different
offces you have different services installed. KDE could in such a szenario
pick the best apps out of the available ones.

If you think that is too complicated for the user, then put the
"one preferred service" in the GUI and set one preference to 1 and
all other ones to 0. No need to remove the flexible approach of
usingt numbers.

But the most important point is not to save preferences in the
services or servicetypes .desktop files!

Bye
Torben

> -- 
> David FAURE
> david@mandrakesoft.com, faure@kde.org
> http://home.clara.net/faure/
> KDE, Making The Future of Computing Available Today
> 
>